HOSPITAL DRIVE - News - University of Virginia

Transcription

Anthology
HOSPITAL DRIVE
A literature and humanities journal of the UVA School of Medicine
Featuring “Formation of Identity” Contest Winners
Anthology & Formation of Identity Contest
Word. Sound. Image.
This anthology is our editors’ choice of
work published since the first edition of
Hospital Drive in 2007, and is our first
print edition. We have been publishing
the creative work of poets, patients,
nurses, doctors, physical therapists,
prose-writers, artists, photographers,
and more since we were founded by
Danny Becker as the online literary and
humanities journal of the University
of Virginia School of Medicine. We
publish original literature and art from
around the world on themes of health,
illness, and healing.
Hospital Drive is the name of an actual road at the University of Virginia.
Set between Thomas Jefferson’s original academic village and the earliest
buildings of the School of Medicine,
it brings visitors into a community of
scholars, teachers, healers, artists, and
the people they serve.
For our first-ever poetry and prose
contest, we sought submissions that
explore the idea of “Identity” within the
context of health—words that would
change the way we think about who
we are. For more on the story behind
our curiosity about Identity formation,
please see the interview with Danny
Becker.
This edition is also available on our
website.
We would like to acknowledge the
support of Sharon Hostler, Joan Klein,
Addeane Caelleigh, Matt Goodman,
Mary Beth Meachum-Whitehill,
Ray Nedzel, and of the University of
Virginia School of Medicine.
Special thanks to Richard Shannon,
Executive Vice President for Health
Affairs at the University of Virginia,
who is both a supporter and reader of
Hospital Drive. Without his help there
would not be a print edition.
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HOSPITAL DRIVE
A literature and humanities journal of the UVA School of Medicine
Editor: Paul Shepherd
Poetry & Founding Editor: Daniel M. Becker
Prose Editor:
Linda Kobert
Managing Editor:
Carrie Gumm
Editorial Staff:
Ambika Babbar, Ashley Davis, Charlotte Heppner, Colin Hill, Dan Luftig, Alice Meiss,
Olivia Quach, Sarah Schall, Amanda St. Ivany, Christa Tabacaru, Lexie Lulu Wang,
Annelise Wilhite, Hui Zhao
Designer: Branner Graphic Design
To find out more about Hospital Drive or to order a copy, please contact us:
University of Virginia, School of Medicine, PO Box 800758, Charlottesville, VA 22908
Email: [email protected]
Cover: UVA Archives
ISBN 978-0-692-62799-0
© 2016 University of Virginia, School of Medicine
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing
from the editors. All statements of opinion or fact are the responsibility of the author alone and not of Hospital Drive, the University of
Virginia, or the School of Medicine.
news.med.virginia.edu/hospitaldrive
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Editor’s Forward
I’m beside my wife’s bed at Butterworth
Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
She’s still out cold from the surgery. A
few hours ago, she donated a kidney
to a boy, a distant relative, and I know
she’s going to be nauseous, disoriented,
and she’d rather not have the television
on when she comes around. Still, if I
can keep the volume low, I can catch a
little news. It’s boring, after all, and trying to read or work in a hospital room
is about as much fun as sorting socks.
She opens her eyes just as Obama
is delivering the eulogy in Charleston
for Clementa Pinckney. We can barely hear—then she asks me to turn it
up, because he’s just started singing
Amazing Grace. It’s the one thing she’ll
remember from this day, over the soreness and incessant nausea.
Over the next few days, we get to
know one of the nurses’ aides—an
orderly, we used to say—very well.
He’s quite young, but there’s a way he
has of checking on her that’s a bright
spot in the long hours. We learn that
he’s applying to medical school, and
working here so that he can get some
real-life experience. “You’re going to be
a good doctor,” she tells him. He’s got
that reassuring mix of gentleness and
confidence, but it’s more than that—
he’s signed on for the journey with her,
he’s with us.
Doctors, nurses, therapists, medics
have access to places in our bodies,
minds, and souls that we don’t even
know ourselves. It’s easy sometimes to
see problems in these places as problems to be solved—and indeed they are.
Incisions are done right. The medicines
are dripping on schedule. When my
wife first sits, then stands, then walks to
the bathroom (and the hated catheter
is finally removed), it’s all according to
plan. We’re often awed by this machinery of medicine, but the real wonder is
in the comforts of kindness, in a question that opens the heart, and in the
ability of each person involved to look
past easy solutions and into meaningful
connections.
These pages give voice to this sense
of wonder. Bringing inspiration and
imagination to the page means bringing inspiration and imagination to the
patient. In the way masterful musicians
find the music not in playing the correct notes, but in seeing what is hidden
in them, masterful healers seek to see
through the equations and diagnoses
and careful incisions to stand humbly
before the mystery of healing itself.
In these pages—in the pouring-out
of who we are—we acknowledge that
we are reaching for that moment we
don’t always understand. Within the
suffering and healing, sometimes a
song breaks out—or a poem, or story,
or painting—to remind us that even
in sterile rooms, we have a deep need
for grace, humility, and to celebrate the
human spirit that endures.
—PS
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Sherborne Abbey Organ
Mother at 92
A Little Soul
The New Patient
Lance Buckley • 52
Harrison O’Connor • 73
Eleanor Leonne Bennett • 93
Susan Okie • 102
First Session
My gift was guessing
John Krumberger • 54
John Casey • 74
Why I Never
Went to College
Dr. Who Overshoots
the 60s
Kids at Art
Carol Baldwin • 96
Rebecca Previs • 41
God Lives on
Brown’s Mountain
Rosey Fingered Dawn
The Distance Ratio
Rotunda Lady
Thomas Wright • 97
Elizabeth Maria Naranjo • 104
NYC Parking
Contributer’s Biographies
Murry Whitehill • 98
Art, Poetry, Prose • 109
Of Time and
the Beauty Contest
New Rothko
Contents
At the Met
Baby in the Closet
Elizabeth Meade Howard • 6
Marianna Crane • 15
Listening to a
Patient with ALS
The Carver
Barbara Brooks • 7
Autumn Leaves
Jim Hagan • 8
Allure and Cure
Sandra Lapham • 8
Grandma-Sitting
Will Clemens • 10
Driving with My Grandpa
Johanna Shapiro • 20
Circles
Mary Richardson Miller • 21
Old Gleason
Jim Hagan • 22
Cowboy Bar
Suppertime at
the Nursing Home
Barry W. North • 24
Seeing Yo-Yo Ma with
the Dayton Philharmonic
Will Clemens • 12
Phantom Pains
Courtney Hartnett • 13
Crayon Drawing
Sharon Hostler • 14
4
Murray Whitehill • 19
Harts Pass Fire Slope
John Voss • 26
Harm’s Way
Tim Kelly • 27
LET X=Y-2
Tim Kelly • 28
Morman Motorcyclist
Discusses Chapter One
of the Tao Te Ching as I
Mobilize His Surgically
Wired-Together Wrist
Tim Kelly • 29
Interview with Founding
Editor, Dr. Daniel M. Becker
Olivia Quach • 30
Home Visit
Daniel M. Becker • 35
Blossom Houdini Medicine
Dianne Nelson Oberhansly • 36
Water for All
Eleanor Leonne Bennett • 37
Doctor Lee
Dave Morrison • 38
Quality of Life
Anjali Jain • 39
Dr. A Surgery
The World’s Shortest
Medical Student Stories:
Life. Death. Survival.
Healing.
Bobbye Cohen • 44
How to be an ER Nurse
Kristin Laurel • 45
A Drunk in the ER
Queen’s Barge
Consent for
a Laryngectomy
Kristin Laurel • 48
Renée Rossi • 58
Sea Turtle & Scuba Diver
Work & Family
Teresa Guise • 49
Steve Cushman • 61
Gravity
Smith Surgery
Kathleen Cain • 50
Equinox
A Surgeon’s Geography
Graham Fulton • 51
Martha Kaplan • 62
Underwater Stroll
Fireflies
Michael Adams • 63
Art at the High
Our Urologist
Kendra Kopelke • 79
Pointing The Finger
Kendra Kopelke • 80
Sunset Mountain
Kenneth Weinberg • 113
Dan Sklar • 100
Sea Turtle
Teresa Guise • 101
Armando Huaringa • 82
Tweaking Fate
Marsha Roberts • 83
Paysaten Thistle
Congratulations to our Formation of Identity contest winners and finalists:
John Voss • 90
Swimming Lessons • 23
Beverly Magovern Lyon
Film Noir • 77
Laura Foley
4:45
At the Assisted Living Facility • 53
Michael Harty
The Wishing Stone • 94
Cecily Markham
He Was Henry Hudson • 64
Linda Chase
Here’s the Dream • 99
Monica Wendel
Dirty Poet • 92
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Barbara Brooks
Listening to a Patient with ALS
It started in my left foot,
it’s the worst one right now.
I don’t want to get stiff,
don’t want a feeding tube,
I want to eat like I always do.
I’ve researched this disease—
it’s stealing my body.
What about your other patients—
the young woman—
does she have children?
And the one
who can’t hold her head up.
You know, you can’t see the wind,
or a word or love. I wonder
if you become energy.
I want to have control at the end.
I think the light people see
is just the brain shutting down.
One week I can get in the tub,
the next, I have to figure a new way.
LEFT:
At the Met
Elizabeth Meade Howard
6
7
Sandra Lapham
Allure and Cure
TRIGGERS
“I haven’t had a drink since December 12,” he said proudly.
“Liquor stores I can deal with. But every time the bus goes
by that 7-Eleven, I see that place in the cooler where my
favorite beer sits, waiting. It haunts me; I haven’t figured
out a way around it.”
JUST ASKING
I was telephoning them ten years after their first interview,
to ask for their participation in a follow-up study of impaired-driving offenders. “Sure, I remember that interview,”
she said kindly. “That was the day I stopped drinking.”
MUG SHOT
She had so many arrests the bondsman got to know
her. After many years she quit drinking. When she saved
enough to pay her debt, she visited him again. He smiled
and, against the rules, presented her last mug shot. “You
can have it,” he said, “you don’t have to look like that no
more.”
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THE URGE
“That medication you gave me worked,” he blurted at his
next office visit. “I didn’t feel drunk even after 12 beers.”
THE LOOK
She had a broken wrist one month, a swollen face the next.
Fell down the stairs? Accident at the gym?
“The medication was intended to stop your craving so you
wouldn’t want to drink, not to prevent you from getting
drunk,” I said.
I met him at a party—he had been drinking. His glower
surprised and scared me. I ended the innocuous discourse
abruptly. I knew.
“Yea, I know, but I was curious,” he demurred.
SAY WHAT?
She hadn’t had a drink since starting the medication.
TIT FOR TAT
My patient, a repeat offender, finally quit drinking. “Great,”
I said. “How did you do it?”
“A drunk driver crashed into my car,” she said.
LUCKY THUMP
Margie could put away ten shots of tequila and twenty
beers in a sitting. One such night, she tumbled down a
flight of stairs, striking her head hard, and woke up. She
hasn’t had a drink since.
“I want to quit the study,” she announced.
“Why?”
“I don’t need to drink any more. Even with alcohol in the
house, my urges to drink are gone.”
“Do you think it’s the medication?”
“Yes!”
“Then why stop taking it?”
“Oh.”
FAR LEFT:
Autumn Leaves
Jim Hagan
9
Will Clemens
Grandma-Sitting
The morning weatherman on Channel 5
in Cincinnati said a sudden drop
in pressure might cause road rage on the highways.
The State Patrol got wind of that I guess.
Each median to Dayton had a cop car.
I calmed myself with Appalachian Spring
until the station faded on the back roads
and the smell of pigs came through my tilted moonroof.
I turned off Stoneybrook onto the limestone lane
which fits in my parents’ front lawn like a spine.
The south lawn stretches to the neighbors’ brook.
The north lawn edges to the nursing home,
where Grandma stayed a week that spring with chest pains.
Mom and Dad were off to rent her home
in Louisville. I came to Grandma-sit.
10
They met me at the front door by the floor clock,
Handel’s quarters chiming with hellos,
the striking almost muting our goodbyes.
With the tenth and final strike still lingering
like dust behind the Buick driving off,
my chubby grandma shuffled down the hall,
her purring calico in figure eights
around her swollen shins and walker legs.
She plopped down in her chair at the breakfast table.
“Down went McGinty to the bottom of the sea,”
she said and licked her lips as I began
to cut into the cooling streuselkuchen.
“See that?” she asked and nodded toward the window
to the goldfinch in the pear out back.
“That’s where you get on board for Mars.”
“Oh, right,” I said and smiled. She meant the tower
that stood beyond the pear tree like a rocket.
Dad had tested it out there and planned
to put it up in Cedar Bog Preserve
to gauge what smog from sprawl could reach the bog.
The goldfinch flew off suddenly. “Look there!”
I whispered, pointing to some moving leaves
in underbrush cut back from the yard.
I thought that deer would spring from them; instead,
two old men, AWOL from the nursing home,
emerged and sipped at something from a flask.
They waddled to the tower, rubbed their chins,
and disappeared like Martians through the brush.
Cowboy Bar
Harrison O’Connor
11
12
Will Clemens
Courtney Hartnett
Seeing Yo-Yo Ma with the Dayton Philharmonic
Phantom Pains
Outside my Honda, under my umbrella,
Dad took my elbow like a wizard’s wand
to move the curbs and puddles from our path.
Indoors, the marble floor was slick with drops,
but Dad, his view eclipsed by retinitis,
wore his rubber-soled Bostonians,
my arm a guide wire to our seats, where silence
shaped the tuning to a cough and whisper.
The sudden tapping of the maestro’s steps
across the stage echoed with applause.
He said, “The good news is the Ark is here;
the bad news is there’s only room for two of us.”
We laughed. He led the way into The New World.
Dvořák’s ode to Spillville, Iowa,
Hanging out clothes on a hot
July evening, my mother told me
stories. The ones I remembered were
gave Ma a chance to rock like Brother Ray.
The rondo boomed into a standing O.
Ma calmed us down and said that he would play
a solo piece called “Appalachia Waltz,”
with Maestro on Tai Chi. Dad couldn’t see
the maestro’s pushing hands or yin-yang feet
but could have imaged them from Navy days
in Hong Kong when his retinas were lit
like Chinese lanterns, soon to flicker out.
Along the street, that bluegrass in our heads,
Dad’s fingers on my arm to Wu-Li dance
across the rain-swept parking lot, he says,
“That concert was the best I’ve ever seen.”
about my great grandmother, the one
with only one leg. They rode in her
wheelchair while she slept:
the fence of one is the freedom of
another. She didn’t talk about the
leg she lost; like a gone family member,
everyone knew what had happened.
Sometimes, though, she would sit quietly,
when the crickets sang at night and
everyone else slept under the
starpricked blanket of sky, and feel the
swirling fields of pain settle where
there was nothing:
an ankle throbbed, a calf spasmed,
a knee pulsed and twitched as
the pains reached with blind
fingers, searching for what was lost.
13
Marianna Crane
Baby in the Closet
Crayon Drawing
Sharon Hostler
14
I heard the soft hum of oxygen flowing into a tented crib as I
made my way down the corridor of the pediatric unit. From
another room, a child barked a wet cough.
I stopped in front of the linen closet and flicked on my
flashlight. I opened the door. The beam of light skimmed
shelves stacked with crib sheets, blankets, and rubber mats
before finally shining on the small bump covered by a blue
blanket in an isolette. The blanket rose and fell with each
baby breath. That’s all I needed to see. I snapped off the flashlight and shut the door.
The baby was still alive.
It was the summer of 1963. I had just turned twenty-one
that May. After graduating from nursing school the previous
fall, Gloria, my nursing school roommate and long-time friend,
and I had quit our full-time positions. We rented a beach
house down the Jersey Shore. Our goal was to find part-time
jobs, party on our nights off, and doze on the sand during the
day. Once the summer was over, we planned to move to San
Francisco. Outside our work environment, where we wore
white uniforms and a professional demeanor, we shared an
immaturity and hunger for a free-spirited lifestyle.
There were two night-shift positions at the community
hospital. We tossed a coin. Gloria won. She got surgery. I
ended up in the pediatric unit.
That night when I arrived to start my shift, the evening
nurse was sitting at the desk in the nursing station. Middle-aged, she wore her dark hair pulled back in a low bun at
the nape of her neck. Usually busy with last-minute charting,
this time she watched my approach in
silence. I pulled up a chair.
The blanket rose
In a soft voice she began the ritual
and fell with each
of giving report: “Room 400, bed one,
baby breath. That’s
two-year-old for observation after a
all I needed to see.
television set fell on his head. He’s
been fine. Going home tomorrow. Bed two, seven-year-old
scheduled for a tonsillectomy.” She finished with room 410,
a private room, which held an eighteen-month-old who had
intermittent spiking fevers.
Thinking she was done with her report, I got up from my
chair.
“Wait,” she said. I eased back down. “There’s a newborn in
the linen closet at the end of the hall. He was born with spina
15
bifida. The parents were told he couldn’t live with his deformities.” Her voice became softer. I leaned in to hear. “Just
notify the nursing supervisor when he dies.”
I felt my chest constrict. A baby being left to die? This
didn’t sound right. But the evening nurse had already risen
as if to ward off any questions. She headed to the chart rack,
pulled out a chair, sat down, selected a chart, flipped it open,
and began to write.
“Oh yes,” she said over her shoulder. “The night supervisor
knows you have a full house. Call her if you need anything.”
Once the evening nurse left, I changed into sneakers. They
were quieter than my nursing shoes and helped me race in and
out of the rooms if I became busy.
“I go home and give Then I took off my cap, the hallmark
my kids a big hug. of my status as a registered nurse. It
Then I thank the good would fall off anyway when I stuck
Lord they’re healthy.” my head inside an oxygen tent. The
night supervisor endeared herself
to me, because when she made rounds on my floor she never
reprimanded me for my sneakers or my bare head.
I braced myself for a hectic shift. Parents weren’t around
to help or hinder since hospital policy prohibited their staying overnight. My nurse’s aide, Hattie, and I monitored our
charges from midnight to dawn. I kept an eye on the sickest
patients, dispensed medications, changed dressings, checked
oxygen tanks, and counted the drops flowing from intravenous
fluids. Hattie took temperatures, changed diapers, and fed the
babies. Each room had a rocking chair for this purpose.
16
I found Hattie in the clean utility room. The acrid odor of
alcohol drifted from two glass containers on top of the steel
cart, one for each used oral or rectal thermometer. Clean
diapers, washcloths, towels, and extra sheets were crammed
onto the bottom shelf. An empty garbage bag hung off one
side of the cart, and a cloth laundry bag for soiled linen hung
off the other.
“No need to do anything for the baby in the linen closet,” I
said, handing her the list of patients that would need temperatures taken. “I’ll check on him.”
Hattie’s pale pink uniform set off her dark skin. Her normally smiling face took on a solemn cast. What else could I
say? I was told to monitor the baby and tell the supervisor
when the baby died. I would follow orders.
Hattie and I were a good team. A few years older than me,
she had worked on the pediatric unit for the past three years.
“How can you deal with sick children all the time?” I had
asked her on one of our first nights together.
“I go home and give my kids a big hug. Then I thank the
good Lord they’re healthy,” she said.
Well, I had no children to go home to. And I had no
intention of staying at this job. After I went off duty, it was
all I could do not to replay the images of the sad, weeping
children alone in their cribs.
I began my rounds, slipping quietly into the rooms,
shining my flashlight on sleeping bodies. The two-year-old
injured by a fallen TV woke. He pulled himself up. The bandage wrapped around his head had slid down over his eyes.
“Mommy,” he called, stretching his arms through the
crib railing. I lifted him out, straightened the white gauze
turban, and rocked him. From my peripheral vision I
watched Hattie tiptoe into the room. She handed me a
sheet of paper.
“This is the only elevation,” she said as she aimed her
flashlight on the paper so I could read her report.
“Damn,” I said under my breath. The eighteen-monthold with fever of unknown origin had a high temperature.
“Sorry,” I whispered to the boy in my lap. “I have to go
now.”
I lowered him back into his crib. He clung to my uniform. I pried open his fists. His sobs followed me as I headed down the hall to the clean utility room to grab towels, a
basin of cold water, and a rubber mat.
I closed the door to the private room behind me and
snapped on the lights. The feverish boy sat in his crib, his
arms limp by his side, his face flushed. His glassy eyes
followed my movements. I hummed as I placed the mat on
the inside of the crib. Setting the basin on the bedside table,
I proceeded to soak two towels, one at a time, in the cold
water, wringing them out and placing them on the mat.
Soon I had the boy undressed and wrapped in the wet
towels. A dry towel encased him, holding in the moisture. I
placed him on my lap, which was covered with the rubber mat to protect my uniform from getting soaked. His
weak cry reached some primal place deep inside me. Tears
dripped down my cheeks as I rocked.
I remembered my student rotation in pediatrics. I felt
helpless when I couldn’t take away pain or discomfort
from the babies or children assigned to me. I had vowed
then never to work in pediatrics. I had to remind myself if
it weren’t for the job, I wouldn’t be able to rent the beach
house, cultivate the perfect tan, or go to bars to
His weak cry reached some
meet boys.
primal place deep inside
Finally the baby’s fever
me. Tears dripped down my
broke. I dressed him in a
cheeks as I rocked.
dry diaper and undershirt
and left him asleep in his
crib. I dropped off the basin, towels, and rubber mat in the
soiled utility room and began to check my patients again.
I started at the end of the hall and cracked the door
open to the linen closet. My flashlight illuminated the
isolette, a simple crate-like box with clear plastic sides that
held a small mattress. Isolettes were used to move babies
from the delivery room to the nursery where they were
washed, swaddled, and taken into the mothers’ rooms
for cooing and cuddling. This baby’s isolette had traveled
from the delivery room directly to the closet. Where were
the parents now? What were they thinking? Did they even
know that their baby was stored in a linen closet?
Staring into the isolette, I prayed. Please let the baby
be alive. Don’t let him die on my shift. The blanket moved.
The baby was breathing. Relieved, I closed the door and
continued rounds.
17
Toward the end of our shift, Hattie and I marched
down the corridor, brightened by the rising sun, to prep
a child scheduled for surgery. I carried a tray with two
hypodermic syringes: one filled with a sedative and the
other with a drug to prevent bradycardia, an abnormally
slow heart rate that can occur with laryngeal stimulation
during surgery.
The bed sheet had twisted around the ten-year-old girl’s
long thin body. She jerked when we approached the bed. In
a second she sprung up from the mattress, her eyes riveted
on the syringes. Having had multiple skin graft operations in
the past, she knew what was coming. She bounced on bare
legs covered with pits and
I was told to notify the night valleys like craters on the
supervisor when he dies. moon from scar tissue
caused by severe burns.
No amount of pleading would entice her to hold still. Finally,
Hattie and I succeeded in encircling her in a sheet, leaving
her right arm out for me to inject. I left the room in a sweat.
Hattie stayed behind to comfort, wash, and dress the girl in a
clean hospital gown.
Soon the day shift arrived: two nurses and two aides. A
few minutes later, the head nurse lumbered into the nurses’
station. She took down the plastic hatbox stored on the
shelf in the coat closet and lifted out a white cupcake cap.
When she emerged from the nurses’ bathroom, the cap was
secured with a bobby pin to the top of her head. Then she
lowered her heavy haunches onto one of the stools by the
18
counter where I waited in my nursing shoes, cap on my
head: professional and deceptively unfrazzled.
I reported on the condition of each of the twenty-one
patients Hattie and I had cared for during the night.
“There’s more,” I said as she started to rise. I told her
about the baby in the closet. I tried not to show emotion,
but my voice cracked when I continued.
“I was told to notify the night supervisor when he dies.”
The head nurse raised her squinty eyes to my face. I
paused for a second to control my emotions. By God she
was not going to see me cry. I forced out each word in staccato rhythm: “He is still alive.”
The head nurse gathered her notes, pushed herself up
from the stool, glanced at the paper stack in the wire bin
on the counter, and said, “You haven’t finished filing the lab
reports.”
While I pasted each report in its respective chart, I tried
to figure out why the head nurse seemed to dislike me. She
never criticized my nursing care, but then she never told
me I was doing a good job either. I decided, in my egotistical way, that she was jealous of my youth, freedom, and
thinness.
Then I thought of Gloria sitting in the visitors’ lounge at
the end of the hall. She always got off on time and waited
for me so we could drive home together. This morning she
would have to wait longer than usual.
I filed the last report and tramped off the unit, slowing
down as I passed the linen closet. I was off for the next two
days. Chances were the baby would have died by the time I
returned.
Gloria leaned against the doorframe to the patient
lounge. Snatching her tanned arm, I pulled her toward
the stairs, anxious to leave the hospital and put this night
behind me.
That was decades ago. I have since raised two children
of my own, built a career, and moved several times. Now,
during the serene days of retirement, I babysit regularly for
my daughter’s children. When she placed my first grandson on my chest and covered him with a blue blanket, I
closed my eyes and felt his breath soft on my cheek. While
we rocked, my mind wandered back to the dim pediatric
corridor. Fragments of memories, long buried, began to
surface.
I see myself young, thin, and tan, dressed in a starched
white uniform. I am walking down the hall of the pediatric
unit. The breathing of my young charges floats from patient
rooms. At the end of the hall I stop in front of the door to
the linen closet—a door I have kept closed for almost fifty
years. I clutch the knob, turn, and push the door open. I
flick on my flashlight. The beam illuminates an isolette. Inside, the blue blanket rises and falls. But instead of quickly
closing the door, I watch myself place the flashlight on the
shelf and lift the baby into my arms.
The Carver
Murray Whitehill
19
20
Johanna Shapiro
Mary Richardson Miller
Driving with My Grandpa
Circles
After my grandpa stopped
being a big city surgeon
he moved to the Ozarks
and became a country doc
how to tip a cow
Mostly the radio blared
twangy tunes or hell-fire preaching
which also brought back the smile
feeding her men
and her pigs, sweeping that floor
till the cancer ate her face
and there was nothing left
When we visited,
my brother and sister
stayed back to eat pancakes
play dirtball or catch fireflies
One time he drove farther out
than I’d ever been
The house was just two rooms
a dirt floor, no electricity
I remember she had no face
But I remember more
the way my grandpa
caressed where her cheek had been
I went with grandpa
in his rickety, rattletrap car
driving along bumpy, unpaved
roads that seemed relentless
In the bed
was a woman with no face
Skin cancer, my grandpa said
This didn’t need to happen, he said
Grandpa didn’t say much
He had a small smile
that showed up
when he asked me if I knew
She never sought out care
until it was far too late
She was too proud and too poor
She worked too hard
The ruby ring of the desk clerk
winks as his fingers force-feed a machine
rapping out my life in long lines,
and the TV hums with General Hospital
and one woman talks to another about
needlepoint, the way women do, and
I sit waiting to be tested, surrounded
by sick people, some sleeping with x-rays
cradled in stick arms, while
I read the saga of a poet, and soaps
give way to Divorce Court, then
I pick up a pen in defense, scribbling my
own saga then stop to stare at the back
of a woman combing her rust-colored hair,
wavy like a corrugated roof, and I wonder
when she dies will her family clip a curl
or two, or torch it with the rest of her,
and I try not to feel, happy to be harping on
pen in hand—focus dammit!—bliss blown
as I bolt to another room
where more pale people wait
drinking apple juice to blast the taste
of fleet-phospho soda, and a woman walks
by wearing a navy wool cap, the kind
longshoremen wear in winter, not here
in the tropics at eighty degrees, and
exotic patients circle with maps,
and a pretty young doctor whirls by
visibly in need of a nap, and the woman
with rust hair arrives reading a prayer book,
and the sewing ladies arrive clutching
their needlepoint, all of us circling, revolving
in and out of waiting rooms, longing
for kindness, for comfort, a doctor, anyone,
and I return to the poet who urges me
to stand like a firm tower that never shakes
in the wind, and finally, we descend into
this comedy of errors in the cold corridors,
and now it’s so late people
are saying goodnight and I still haven’t seen
a doctor and we are all disoriented, disheveled,
and I know Dante would circle with us while
someone somewhere decides which door
we’ll enter and when.
21
Formation of Identity contest winner—Poetry
Beverly Magovern Lyon
Swimming Lessons
Would it have made a difference if I had arrived in a later season,
say, spring 1945 or fall of ‘53?
Would my mother have learned to float by then, confident and tan?
Suppose my grandmother had not stepped out for a smoke,
but had stayed at her station sorting the Red Delicious,
would she have spotted the auburn-haired sailor with tattoos and a bit of mischief?
She called him Red. He called her Dot.
Would she still have been a mother at fifteen?
If her own mother, my great grandmother, had not set her adrift
among a sea of wimples in an orphanage cleaning endless
octagonal tiles with a frayed toothbrush,
would my grandmother have learned somewhere
the buoyancy of love?
Old Gleason
Jim Hagan
22
And if my great-great grandfather, a fisherman with chapped hands and a salt-licked face,
had not left his wife with a splintered boat and four daughters to raise,
would she still have pawned off the eldest to the first man in town who walked on land?
Would it have mattered if that fisherman had learned to swim?
Would I be drowning now?
This poem should be required
reading at life guard school. The
first rule at life guard school? Don’t
drown. I teach that rule to my
patients who are caregivers and
slowly learning that not everyone
can be rescued. It’s also worth
teaching to everyone who rescues
or harbors rescue fantasies.
—DB
23
Barry W. North
Suppertime at the Nursing Home
Every evening at 5:30
I do what I’ve dreamed of doing for years.
I leave my past behind and start anew,
even though it is not exactly the way I imagined it.
I have not moved to a scenic little burg in Mississippi.
I am not living above the only bar in town.
The feisty little redhead pushing drinks down below,
her ass twitching like an invitation
everybody in the joint thinks is addressed to him,
is not enthralled with the aura of mystery surrounding me.
Her ten-year-old son has not taken to calling me dad.
I am not sailing novels out of my window, like paper airplanes,
which land, more often than not, on
The New York Times Bestseller List.
(Although, I must admit, my old dreams
have been hanging around lately,
looking like long departed relatives,
somebody up there breathed life back into.)
When I see the mayor he does not, in deference,
tip his hat to me.
24
This is because I did not,
while everyone looked on,
pull his useless alcoholic son out of his brand new Mustang,
which was slowly sinking to the bottom of that thirty-foot deep canal directly across from the bar.
Indeed, if the truth must be told,
I am no hero at all.
In fact, I have never done
a single heroic deed worth mentioning.
But when I cross that threshold at suppertime,
I swear I grow a foot.
To the beat up, worn out residents in their wheelchairs,
I am more powerful than a locomotive.
They would not be surprised to learn that yesterday
I leapt a tall building in a single bound.
I wheel them in and out of the dining room.
I smile;
I hold their hands;
I stroke their faces;
I listen to their gibberish.
The small kindnesses I offer they accept,
like enormous checks written out in their names,
which they cash and give me the money.
25
Tim Kelly
Harm’s Way
Every street, every field,
every fishbone, every baby carriage
wheeled through a Saturday Market
ticking; every barbeque finger-licking.
Every tock, every tick, every
vaccinating needle, every prick
you ever dated, every rash, however
belated, that itched? You are hitched
to Harm like a mule, girl, humbled,
tumbled from your antiseptic throne,
and driven by Harm past the bone-
yard, his subs throbbing the street,
thumping your eardrums, twigging
the trees. Why not be sweet? says he.
They’re digging folks new digs here
daily, baby. Yet the world seems to
shiver with beauty and good cheer.
Even acknowledging every factoryslaughtered steer, every breast exam
and Pap smear, every death-defying
drive to the Southcenter Ikea.
You get the idea.
LEFT:
Harts Pass Fire Slope
John Voss
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27
28
Tim Kelly
Tim Kelly
LET X=Y-2
Mormon Motorcyclist Discusses Chapter One
of the Tao Te Ching as I Mobilize His
Surgically Wired-Together Wrist
Let the mass of the body be halved
upon submersion, and the buoyant limbs
lay on the surface like long, complicated
kisses. Let bodies at rest remain at rest,
and bodies in motion, absent frank thwarts
and frictions, carry on. Let the sun
conduct searches and bones conduct sound.
Let the slope of the serotonin reuptake
curve be always less than the slope of its
rate of release. Let words in their beauty
and inconstancy be periodically fire-hosed
from the head, and the sensual world,
in its radiance, be quietly attended to. Let
surprise have a small, candlelit shrine
in the corner of the kitchen, and tenderness
connect down the valley like the ringing
of Italian churches a half hour before
Sunday Mass, their massive, shivering bells,
incomprehensibly cast, carried centuries ago
to their belfries and hung, heavy-tongued,
ropes dangling down from their collars,
waiting, in slant-light and birdsong, for
the hour and the soul who swings them.
I name for him, pointing, the hamate,
scaphoid, triquitral, three of the eight
carpal bones, arranged in the wrist
like partially dissolved sugar cubes
puzzled into two articulated rows.
He closes his eyes to memorize, lips
moving over the revelatory words.
Name God, he says, watching my hands
bending his swollen, stitch-riddled
wrist, and you’ve failed to say anything,
to discriminate, conjure, or signify
the source, the deeper pulse, the essence
that infuses this rose-raveled life,
the perfection. That’s so, I agree; words
are human inventions, and therefore,
by definition, imperfect. But useful,
surely, practical, even deeply moving,
as in a poem or prayer. He says Yes,
but the name of the Way is not the Way
is what Lao Tsu says. OK, but here
I just want to know the actual name
of the tiny, stuck, motherfucking bone
that’s hurting me.
29
Olivia Quach
Interview with Founding Editor,
Dr. Daniel M. Becker
Danny, where does your inspiration
to write come from?
Dr. Daniel M. Becker, Director of
the Center for Biomedical Ethics
and Humanities, the Tussi and John
Kluge Professor of Palliative Medicine,
Professor of Medicine in the Division
of General Medicine, Geriatrics, and
Palliative Care at UVA, and founding
editor-in-chief of Hospital Drive, sat
down with us for an interview about
his own journey and formation of
identity through writing and medicine.
30
From reading and the need to play
around with words and images and
ideas. I like the sounds, I like to count
the syllables, I liked Dr. Seuss when
I was a kid and when I was a parent
reading to my kids. I cannot resist
wordplay and puns, and even though
puns annoy many people, they did
not annoy Shakespeare. I’ve felt and
nurtured a sense of obligation to the
patients and families and colleagues
whose stories I enter. But mostly I
write about life outside of hospitals
and clinics. You don’t have to be dying
or in terrible pain to be of interest.
Certain images seems to appear again
and again in my writing, mostly things
I feel affection for—people and places;
it’s refreshing and recharging to me
to have them enter a poem. Dogs and
cats, with and without hats, like to
wander through my poems and stories.
I never set out to write a poem on a
specific topic; instead it usually starts
with some curious thing I saw or heard
that seems to be ripe with something.
For example, a patient was telling me
about how their child’s birthday party
was based on a spy theme—that got
me thinking that’d be a great basis for a
poem. It really doesn’t take much to get
started.
Take me through your thought
process when you write. What comes
to mind? What words do you go
through and how do they evolve?
I think poetry should jump around a
lot and rely less on logic than sounds,
meter, word play, rhyme, and other
literary craft devices. Someone taught
me early on that poetry discovers its
intent as you move down the page,
often changing direction as you write. I
believe a piece of writing needs to stand
the test of time; I’ll finish a piece and
put it away for a month before looking
at it again. When I return to a piece of
writing, I find I may need to scrap it.
Revision is very important, and it may
often take more than a word change or
a line break. Deciding to scrap a poem
is like breaking up with a girlfriend—
you need to think about it. Often you
end up throwing away your favorite
line because the poem has migrated
away from that. Simply put it into storage to be used in the future.
Why do you write? And how did you
eventually come to publish your work
in so many literary journals (JAMA,
Pharos, Yale Journal of Medical
Humanities, Ars Medica, Poetry Lore,
to name a few)?
Writing is a selfish endeavor. It makes
me happy. Most people don’t write in
order to grieve, repair relationships,
or to be better people. They just get
pleasure from writing. Though I do
think we need to be read—we can’t just
write in a vacuum, sooner or later we
need to share it. When I was division
chief, I used to write poems to the staff
for their birthdays and Christmas,
and I soon came to realize this was my
favorite part of the job. I even wrote patient results into notes as little poems.
So I took a writing class at UVA with
Charles Wright, and started sending
my works to clinical journals that accept poetry. It’s very addictive once you
start sending out your work—it’s hard
to stop. There is an important difference in the review process of scientific
versus literary journals. In scientific
journals, you get the opportunity to
resubmit, a second and third chance.
But in literary journals, you either get
accepted or thanked. It hurts to be
rejected; it hurts for about five minutes,
starts to ache, and then after a day you
stop thinking about it. It’s important to
emphasize that the primary pleasure
in writing comes in creation, not in
getting accepted or published.
And what’s one thing you wish
readers would take away from
your work?
A smile.
So after writing and publishing
yourself, how did Hospital Drive get
started? What was your vision?
About 10 years ago, the dean at the
School of Medicine asked me to direct
what has now become the Center for
Biomedical Ethics and Humanities.
The Center is located in a building on
Hospital Drive, and it occurred to me
that Hospital Drive would be a perfect
name for a magazine, as many literary
magazines have their origin in hospitals. I went to the dean, told him my
brilliant idea, and he said, “That’s a
terrible name.” But he liked the idea.
I still think it’s a great name. I like the
idea that it’s a name that literally is
31
taking you somewhere—you’re entering a creative space, a wonderful legacy
of writing at UVA, from Jefferson to
Edgar Allen Poe to the great William
Faulkner. And whoever tries to write,
and tries hard, will want and need
readers. Hospital Drive allows novice
as well as accomplished writers to meet
some readers.
If you can’t get the story right,
you can’t take care of people.
Why do so many literary magazines
have their origin in hospitals? What
do you feel is the connection between
writing and medicine?
We sure like to argue that humanities
are good for doctoring. You have to
respond to patients and try to get the
story right. If you can’t get the story
right, you can’t take care of people.
You have to be curious, otherwise it’s
just a gallbladder surrounded by other
organs. Once you’re interested in the
story, it becomes more than a professional interest—it becomes fascinating,
32
entertaining. Voltaire once defined “art
of medicine” as entertaining the patient
while nature cures the patient.
When writing about a patient, you
have to take care that they can’t be
identified. To get around this, I’ll often
take two difficult patients and marry
them and then write about the couple,
their dogs and kids, so it’s not that hard
to fictionalize the encounters. I steal
from patients all the time, also from
their families and visitors, even from
strangers in the elevator with me. Not
everyone knows that you are supposed
to be quiet inside the elevator. I think
driving to work is a great opportunity
to let the mind open all its windows
and pay attention to what’s coming in.
In speaking about your career, you’ve
mentioned that one of the greatest
challenges you’ve faced has been
struggling with “imposter syndrome.”
How do you deal with this? What
advice do you have to overcome this?
Yes, like a lot of doctors, I suffer from
an imposter syndrome. “What is a guy
like me doing in a place like this, with
all these brilliant accomplished people?
Sooner or later they will figure out I
don’t belong.” I don’t feel that way with
being a doctor. You learn doctoring by
getting thrown into the deep end. After
that, it’s easy to know what your role
is and where you are. But my imposter
syndrome is that I’m underqualified
to be speaking about writing. I haven’t
achieved that much. Even a minor reputation is more than nothing though,
so I’ve often been called upon to introduce writing exercises or to represent
writers in some way. I think maybe because it’s hard to teach writing. I taught
a writing retreat for five summers and
found that eager new writers need a
really good writer to be pointing the
way for them, and I felt like I was only
a half step ahead of them.
This syndrome is highly prevalent
around the School of Medicine where
people have a lot of ambition—honorable ambition, but ambition nonetheless. Be honest with yourself and look
at your achievements in the proper
context; have a few close friends as
your professional identity (as a doctor
or writer) develops. It’s one thing to
be disappointed by a piece of writing,
and an entirely different thing to make
a mistake in your role as a physician.
The best physicians have bad outcomes,
but it doesn’t mean you don’t blame
yourself. Part of this syndrome is
related to the need to be perfect. There
are lots of perfectionists who end up
in medical school. But we make little
allowances for perfection because the
stakes are high. Writing is one way to
process the privilege of being involved
in life or death situations and the way
families trust you and let you know
their hardest secrets. Sooner or later,
we all figure out we can’t always be the
smartest person in the room. There
are all kinds of smarts. You can make a
mistake and patients will still trust you.
Trust requires respect.
How can we find our identity in the
face of this “imposter syndrome”?
Why is identity important? What is
identity?
Do you know what the newest thing
in academic medical education is?
Professional Identity Formation or
PIF. To me, PIF is paying attention
to how you change for the good and
bad, and being reflective and knowing
how it feels to have done a good job
and who noticed that and who should
have noticed that. Teachers that are
inspiring you or what family or patient
interaction mattered to you. I remember being a grateful med student who
learned from a wise intern that it’s
mostly flying by the seat of your pants.
Up to that point, my goal had been to
learn everything, retain everything,
regurgitate everything. The problem with that strategy is the vomit. I
remember becoming an independent
problem solver myself: being able to
see a patient late at night by myself
and knowing how to handle that.
Knowing when to shut up and listen to
an angry family. Knowing how to take
a struggling resident aside (and then
a colleague) and help them feel better
about what they’re doing. There’s more
to professionalism than getting charts
done on time and wearing a white coat
that’s clean.
The other piece of identity presents
itself when we’re walking alone and
the conversation that’s going on. Who’s
talking to who? Poetry is full of that.
The first person narrator isn’t the poet,
it’s the speaker. That’s some other person speaking as “I.” Czeslaw Milosz,
the great Polish poet and Nobel laureate, said the “purpose of poetry is to
remind us how difficult it is to remain
just one person.” Cultivating empathy,
trying to imagine what that must be
like, what someone would say in a
situation like that—that’s what writing
is about. A part of identity is to walk
about a situation and use different eyes
and different ears. Medical school is
not nice to your imaginative capacity;
it bludgeons that into a corner of your
brain. Poetry is supposed to light up
all parts of your brain. Which is also
what playfulness is supposed to do.
Being out of character is good for us,
helps us figure out what we know and
don’t know or what we wish we did
know. I get up early every morning,
33
open Word in my computer, find what
I’d been writing the morning before,
and get right back to work changing
the identity of whoever happens to be
speaking. Forget everything you know
about psychology and let the characters present themselves. With some
of my favorite authors, the characters
seem so real and unique, you would
think there’s no way they could have
been made up.
In your years of experience, how do
you recommend future writers get
started?
Read. And if you’re in a demanding
field of work, try to read outside of
that demanding field. Find some
favorite authors, and learn to write by
reading their works. If you don’t get a
thrill from reading a really nice sentence, then you’re probably not going
to be a writer. I encourage writers to
keep index cards in their pockets and
tune their ears to their surroundings
and write down anything they find
interesting. Often dreams are worth
34
writing down. They allow us to leap
into a different space and be in the
presence of something strange, weird,
uncanny. Writing our dreams down
can help us get back to that feeling in
some way.
And any advice for young healthcare
professionals?
A few things. Getting up at 5 AM will
not kill you and you actually do get
used to it, strange and impossible as
that might seem. Long hours? You sort
of get used to them, but the days off are
well earned.
Another, first be happy at home. I
gradually discovered—one spring after
another—that I can garden and that
there’s no place on the planet as nice
as the patio next to that garden. Home
sweet home.
And did you know that petting dogs
and cats will raise oxytocin levels for
both the petter and the pettee? Cats
lower blood pressure, as long as you’re
not allergic. One of the great advances in clinical medicine has been the
advent of therapy dogs. Our clinic has
one: small, calm, quiet, affectionate, hypo-allergenic. Housebroken. She seems
to like me best. My secret? I always
have dog treats in my pocket. My dogs
taught me that trick. They come in
handy during home visits. First make
friends with the dog.
Olivia Quach is a 4th
year medical student at
the University of Virginia
who has always had a
strong interest in writing, editing, and
publication design.
Daniel M. Becker
Home Visit
We follow a blue Ford tractor pulling a wagon
and moving slowly, scattering straw like exhaust,
Southside Virginia in July, still haying season,
so hot the haze shimmies on the asphalt,
June bugs strafe the windshield,
the afternoon breeze a warm sponge.
The nurse is the guide, telling me
how to greet other drivers,
lift two fingers from the steering wheel,
only two, show some restraint;
where to park—don’t crowd the son-in-law
who’s not even home, still lord of the roost;
watch out for the dog, stretching a yawn,
scored ribs settling on a minor chord;
who’s who as we edge through the home
front porch to back, generations ungapped,
no work, no school, no a/c; fans whir,
TV promises a better life.
We reach the kitchen and in the pantry
an old woman with electric hair
and petrified eyes hums a gospel,
she’s expecting Jesus, sweet Jesus.
Surrounded by mason jars
and the sterile paraphernalia of age,
she welcomes us, more peas in the pod.
Light and air succumb to odors
fresh and stale, cooking and human.
The bed points to a screen door,
a mowed field ends at the sky,
crows crackle, the sun beckons.
Later we admire a huge cabbage,
king of the garden, peerless in the weeds.
The nurse and the daughter discuss the future,
old friends sharing summer plans, arms folded,
squinting in the sunshine, staring at the ground.
I’m there to listen and agree,
there’s some shade and the breeze will last.
35
Dianne Nelson Oberhansly
Blossom Houdini Medicine
Her father says she is growing speed
bumps, a reference to her thirteen-year-old
breasts, soft hilltops beneath a yellow
tee shirt. The words blossom
and Houdini come to mind. After all,
a kind of magic is at work. Fleshy
lumps and curves, she is
being made while
an older friend of mine is
slowly being unmade,
her breast whittled away
by something once thought magic
and now called medicine.
It seems life is wasteful, spilling
so much excess, allowing
so much beauty that even the cancer
when magnified
looks like a delicate snow crystal. The
thirteen-year-old giggles
not yet knowing that what is given
can be taken away, suddenly
in a white sterile room smelling
of betadine and money. Once
undergoing surgery, I awoke, looked up into
the surprised and slightly fuzzy face
of the doctor, asked him if I could
see the incision he’d made. Hesitantly
he agreed. I raised my head, peered
across the bare white field of my chest,
saw the newborn hole—a single wet red rose,
the scalpel’s offering. Then,
with the doctor’s nod, his assistant
RIGHT:
flooded me with twilight.
Water for All
Eleanor Leonne Bennett
36
37
38
Dave Morrison
Anjali Jain
Doctor Lee
Quality of Life
I have to go to my
doctor for back pain—
it seems that I have
asked me how I felt. I told
him that it felt like there were
glass rods in my shoulders
he said. Finally. A doctor who
understands me. It will empty
my bank account, and I don’t
glass rods in my shoulders
held in place with rusted
iron pins, and it’s to the
held in place with rusted iron pins.
“That must be it then,” he said,
“What do you suppose we should
care. Soon I’ll be able
to dance.
point where I can’t even
shrug. My friend told me
about Doctor Lee while I
do about it?” I told him that the
glass rods needed to be shattered
with a billy club wrapped in
was signing her cast. “Unorthodox,
but none of the mumbo-jumbo.”
On my first visit Doctor Lee
soft cloth, and the pins needed to
be melted with a blowtorch.
“That’s exactly what we’ll do.”
Dr. Becker it was
who said
it was important
to be able to enjoy a baseball game
that that
was life still
with enough
life worth holding onto,
clutching,
saving.
Never mind the tubes
for breathing
excreting
etc., etc.
Never mind
not being able to get up
or down
or talk or read or walk
or make sense of things
whether or not
they make sense
at all—
at all.
Just the arc
the white line you draw with your eyes
white against night
chalk against a chalkboard
and the roar that thunders
that you can feel with the soles of your
feet
rumbling trembles
up your legs
to your chest
almost
you feel
like you are there,
really there.
39
Rebecca Previs
The World’s Shortest Medical Student Stories:
Life. Death. Survival. Healing.
Introduction
Steve Moss, editor of The World’s Shortest Stories, writes:
“How short can a story be and still be considered a story?” He
describes Charles Schultz’s “Peanuts,” when Lucy reluctantly
answers Linus’s request to tell him a story: “A man was born.
He lived and died. The end.”
The fifty-five-word story offers physicians a quick and
dirty way to recount a patient encounter, a difficult situation
in the operating room, a passing view of a long parade. These
stories can be written while waiting for someone to return a
page, while the anesthesiologist brings the patient back to the
OR, or while a nurse puts a patient in a clinic room.
When I first learned of this creative outlet in my Medicine
and Literature class, I became hooked. I rarely have the
luxury of follow-up, so these stories don’t have neat endings.
Dr. A Surgery
HATE CRIME
The twenty-something with creamy, black skin, long curly
eyelashes. I take the history of all new patients.
“It was a hate crime,” he said. “They held me down, heated a knife and carved G-A-Y into my back. I want to join
the Army.”
The attending examines: “We risk making this worse.
Look at the keloids.”
DELIVERY
Armed guards change shift every twelve hours. My patient,
the multiparous inmate, dilates quickly. This Friday night,
I will deliver my first baby. I gown, she pushes, my hands
wait, empty and ready.
Two pushes later, I shout, “Happy Birthday!”
I clean the mother, hand over the hungry child, thinking: “Welcome to this cruel world.”
Murray Whitehill
40
41
CAULIFLOWER AND CHIPS
Surgeons fillet open her abdomen. We peek inside. Friable,
cauliflower-shaped metastases cake the omentum, disguise
the liver and diaphragm. Suturing her abdomen closed, I
know they will offer her salvage chemotherapy.
We round. Grandson sits on her bed, feeding her smuggled-in chips.
She asks, “Is it gone? Can we go home?”
BRAIN DEATH EXAM
The book open on the patient’s bed to the chapter on brain
death. I stared, heard my heart beat in time with the cardiac monitor.
Pinched his finger. Nothing. Harder, still nothing. Pried
his eyelid open, cold pupil staring. No corneal reflex. Lifted
heavy legs to elicit deep tendon reflexes. Not a flicker. Negative Babinski.
ON NOT MAKING A DIFFERENCE
An almost fatal accident. Not expected to make it through
the night, we do all we can.
Trauma, elderly female, no one even knows her name or
a family member to call.
The intern stuffs a chest tube to relieve her hemothorax.
I delicately suture multiple hand lacerations, which matters
to no one but me.
A NEW UMBILICUS
A scrub nurse hands me the needle driver. I feign confidence. Fourteen inches need subcutaneous suturing. I encounter where her umbilicus once was. “Make a new one,”
I’m told. I throw in a few extras to make the skin fold.
Next morning, her bandage removed, “You’re practically
bikini ready,” I say. A survivor of cancer, she laughs.
A CURE?
Prickly gray hair tufts returned to her bald head, her body
ravaged from the chemotherapy.
“Bad protoplasm,” the residents said when her abdominal wound opened. Dressing it twice daily, the crater took
me ten minutes to fill with fluff. She begged us not to mention the wound vac. She cried.
Her ovarian cancer was cured.
FAMILY
Two brothers lived together all their lives. One went to
war, the other stayed home and took care of the farm. They
married twins in a double wedding, each had a son only a
month apart.
In their final days, beds pushed together, they hold
hands finding comfort in the silence of time well spent.
CHERUB ON EARTH
Cherub face crying. His parents never come. Impossible
story to piece together: the regression of his development,
the origin of his posturing.
No one to hold or love him, except the idle medical
student. I would never become a pediatrician, but I could
carry around this child, rocking him while I wrote my
other notes.
42
THREE
I enter the room, he smiles. I give him a hug. His caretaker worries about his worsening memory. Could he have
Alzheimer’s? I tell him, “Name all the animals you can in
one minute.”
He begins, “Dog, cat…” He smiles.
I ask him again. “Coon?”
We smile at each other as the seconds tick by.
ANATOMY LAB
I despised her body despite her selfless gift to the eager
medical student. Her thick flesh dulled the knife blades.
Her abundant adipose tissue stained my lab jacket through
to my skin. Her body harbored the fumes of preservation
burning my nostrils, making my eyes water. Exploring her
depths, I knew I’d become a surgeon.
THE CORNER ROOM
Status post neck dissection, I wiped mucous from his
trach each day. Nurses sat at computers, playing games. He
longed for a walk in his cranberry-colored pajamas, just
around the floor. No one to help him, I lugged the oxygen
tank. Announced he would get out of bed, whether they
helped or not.
IGNORANCE AND CONFIDENCE
First day on wards, I stood scrubbed in the OR afraid of
contamination. The surgeon barked, “Get a stool, stand
across.” He sawed open the sternum, handed me the harpoon-like instrument. “Can you do it? Cannulate the aorta.”
I stared him down. “Of course I can.” He admired my
confidence, which disguised my ignorance.
HOLDING A HEART
I held a human heart for three hours. My arm ached, but I
dared not complain. I felt high, adrenaline rushing through
my veins. What a privilege.
After the bypass, flickers of life returned to muscles, the
heart throbbed, life returned.
I skipped home late that night, did not require sleep or
food for three days.
43
Kristin Laurel
How to be an ER Nurse
First, forget everything you have learned, and
trust your gut. You will follow reasonable orders,
pass out pills, push drugs into veins, push bodies in carts,
in wheelchairs, to x-rays. You will draw blood, dump urine,
hold buckets while people puke, hand out washcloths,
ice packs, crutches, papers, armbands, attach tubing to noses,
into penises, vaginas and veins, up noses, into rectums.
You will dress wounds, hold pressure, clean up crap,
learn to breathe through your mouth so you don’t have to smell,
wipe blood off the floor, wash your hands, and run to the next buzzer,
listen to the next set of complaints, take another blood pressure,
temperature, ask do you have any allergies, do you have any allergies
Rotunda Lady
Bobbye Cohen
44
What brought you to the hospital?
As you try to listen to the lady with a purple scarf
in her hair, distended neck veins, three moles on the side
of her cheek who tells you I don’t need to tell you all of this,
you’re just the nurse, but she does tell you—about her dog
who happens to be a Weimaraner, and she really likes
Weimaraners, it’s her third one she’s owned, and
they are like children. Last night she tripped
45
over her dog’s leash and aha she hurt her ankle, asks
Do you think I broke it, as she stands first in line in the crowded
waiting room, with people coughing, sneezing, fingers bleeding
to get into this place and that little voice that’s been saving your ass
for the last twenty years says, get the lady with the back pain at the end of the line,
so you excuse yourself, tag the back pain lady, tell the ER doc,
order an EKG, go back out to the mass of waiting people,
to the now angry Weimaraner lady with the purple scarf,
relieved you brought the back pain lady back because
she’s having a heart attack.
As you can see, idealism won’t last long.
Cynicism will keep calling, leaving messages.
You’re not going to save the world, but you are getting paid.
Sometimes people tip with a smile or “thank you,”
sometimes they throw things and say “fuck you.”
You may actually save someone’s life,
or at least stop someone else from making them worse, or
killing them, including yourself: Pay Attention!
You will hold hands as people die, and help keep people alive
who want to die. You will become comfortable or uncomfortable
with your own mortality; learn there are much worse ways of living
than dying. Before you go to work and after you get off work—
hug your kids, tell everyone you love, you love them.
Never pass up an opportunity to hold a baby in your arms.
Look into everyone’s eyes, especially the elderly
(of course, only if it’s culturally acceptable).
46
Everybody’s got a story, when you’re not running your butt off,
stop and listen. Keep laughing, even if it’s dark.
It’s like an old man who was dying of cancer said,
Well, I started out in this world wearing diapers,
I guess I’m going to leave in them too.
Don’t forget to take care of yourself, it’s ok.
And if you’re co-dependent, it might be helpful. Who else would do this job?
Befriend your co-workers, they are your family for this shift, or a lifetime.
Medical people make great friends, with the exception of a few narcissists.
Stay away from them. Don’t define yourself by what you do for a living,
but what you do as a person. Never forget, it’s the little things, like a warm blanket
that can make all the difference. Don’t be afraid to touch, to hug.
You are going to see the best and the worse of the human race,
and if you get sick of sick people coughing, vomiting,
dying, crying, screaming, laughing, baring their souls to you;
if your feet and back ache, and your head spins because
you’re tired of people getting drunk, stabbing, shooting, and raping each other,
smoking, and drinking and eating their way to death, and you’ve read
When Bad Things Happen to Good People and you’re still sick of the human race
and want to go live on an island, or be a writer…cut down your hours.
And if you ever get to the point where you feel you’ve just about seen everything,
you just about know everything, or you really don’t care anymore,
Hurry up and get out of the ER and close this manual!
47
Kristin Laurel
A Drunk in the ER
Handcuffed at two o’clock in the afternoon
her blond hair is highlighted with red streaks
her diamond earrings are caked
like her face in a mask of brownish red blood.
And that’s all it took—
that, and taking off the handcuffs,
telling her she’s only here so we can stitch her up.
She opened up like an artery…
Her breath smells of a dead rotten rodent,
curled up and trapped inside her throat.
She looks right at me: “Don’t judge me, bitch,
you don’t know a fucking thing about alcohol.”
I love rehab, I’ve been three times,
I’ve got three kids at home,
they’re going to be so disappointed with me.
I was doing so good, I was sober for a year, then
The officer says: “She was pulled over for erratic driving.
She blew .30, and when we put her in the squad car
she began banging her head against the cage
until she cracked her head open.”
my dad died a month ago.
I went over to the house today to mow the lawn,
and found my dad’s bourbon.
You don’t know alcohol like I do,
The glazed red lines in her eyes have a story to tell
a gentler path of tears roll down her cheeks as
she sobs: “You don’t know a thing about alcohol.”
“I know a little,” I say.
how strong it is, how it consumes you,
drowns the person right out of you—
You don’t know a thing about alcohol—
My father’s last words were:
“Make me a stiff one.”
48
RIGHT:
Sea Turtle &
Scuba Diver
Teresa Guise
49
Kathleen Cain
Graham Fulton
Gravity
Equinox
for Dan
From three floors up,
outside the ICU window,
my brother watches two swallows
arc and soar as they chase after
some pale thing:
Across the room
our father gasps for air. The white crane’s
neck of the ventilator infuses his chest
with air ten times a minute—he must do
the rest—although he can barely catch
a wing beat of breath.
too large for a moth. Flotsam
from a shopping bag, as it turns
out, rising on August wind, always
out of the south. One bird lets go
His hands flutter in baby-bird struggle.
He lifts his head, intent on rising,
then sinks back. Earthbound, in spite
of the room, the world: so full of air.
of the plastic, no bigger than a feather,
to tease the second, which swoops,
tuxedo-tail atwist,
to snatch the scrap and climb;
swift elegance of tawny rose and indigo.
50
You’ll soon be moved to another hospital
closer to home when the infection has left
and then you’ll be sent home and we’ll
have to get you a wheelchair and we’ll
have to learn how to use the wheelchair
and we’ll learn how to feed you and lift you
in and out of the bath and we’ll learn how to
wipe your arse and learn how to be mothers
and learn how to make you see that you are
not a burden which is what you fear most of all
but have never been and will never be
and all around us is the day of equal night
and a door for our spirits that can open or close
and the moment to choose the night won’t win.
Underwater Stroll
Lance Buckley
51
Formation of Identity contest finalist—Poetry
Michael Harty
At the Assisted Living Facility
They straggle across two rows
of handicapped spaces, tugging their young
toward the wide pneumatic doors,
adjusting their faces. Smile, Trevor,
Grandpa wants to see you smile.
They steel themselves to invade
the land of the frail, of Jell-o
dinners and the same words
over and over in babytalk;
of rice-paper skin, veins showing through
like parsley stems; of too-warm
disinfected air no one breathes
too deeply for fear
of smelling something dead.
They pause at the door for a motorized chair
to exit; they go in holding their breath.
The man in the chair does not look
left or right, nor does he tell them
the chair’s name is Trigger.
52
LEFT:
Sherborne Abbey Organ
Lance Buckley
53
John Krumberger
First Session
“the therapist is always a mother”
—Sigmund Freud
At the doorway introduction,
his eyes, his hands, his body
say “you won’t know me,”
then: my sponsor says I should talk to you,
meaning: it’s not my idea,
meaning: you won’t know me,
meaning: I’ve come now you do the rest.
And yet
here in this place where I preside
balding and maternal,
silence secures the space between us
until my reassuring voice arrives
commanding him to his chair
where memory is smoothed to a stone
suddenly found in his pocket
—his story seeping out
from an underground spring,
the poetry of it surprising him:
After 30 years of drinking
he wondered where he had been, waking
in a hotel in South Dakota
to pour his last booze
down a rat hole sink.
Two wives, two daughters
who wouldn’t talk to him;
in the mirror the lines
of a dry stream bed
carved on his face,
and outside hay baled and left
like boulders in the grass. He watched
snow geese in tight formation,
recalling the military jets
—F14s, F22s—he once flew…
Then his voice cracks
as he discards his mask and I see
he wants forgiveness.
I see he is a boy.
I see sunlight breaking through a morning
fog as I adjust my own mask,
moving closer with my chair.
RIGHT:
God Lives on Brown’s Mountain
Harrison O’Connor
54
55
Queen’s Barge
Lance Buckley
56
57
Renée Rossi
Consent for a Laryngectomy
Loss of voice, loss of breathing through
mouth, loss of sense
of smell and then the uncomfortable pause—
a tightening of my own glottis in response to—
a textbook opens its glossies in front of
my eyes, false cord strumming, epiglottis flapping. What does it look like now? Your glottis is shaped like a star sucked into the night of…
what I want to do is anything but operate, let nature take
its course as the rambling say in the Texas Panhandle where
the great Palo Duro Canyon’s cut out
slowly, little by little by a little
river, Prairie Dog Town Fork,
the byproducts of combustion on human mucosa, bright red
58
Triassic shales, clay, and sandstone litter its rim with dysplasia, then
carcinoma in situ,
the Trujillo and Tecovas yellow-pink and lavender shales, full-blown invasive finally
the Ogalalla
sandstone, silt, and caliche, the whole of geologic history in these bare canyon walls
a substrata of damaged mucosa, too,
and what has this to do with loss of a larynx? You’ll swallow just
the same as before, in fact, never again aspirating on
a cracker in your windpipe. In the usual sense, no, you will not
be able to swim. Water is sucked straight into
the lungs. Summer, this landscape is desertlike. Don’t smell and taste go together? Bargaining
against the pleasure of years watching sunsets smoking Pall Malls filterless. As protection
against dust, the trachea undergoes metaplasia to withstand the now
harsh environment, exposure for which you’ll wear
a little apron over a bare hole in your neck. Not only
water but wind
59
Steve Cushman
Work & Family
whipping through the canyons over years causes such erosion, too. You’ll drive for
miles across the High Plains south of Amarillo, flat, the treeless country inspiring
only drowsiness, mirages & so
forth, until you enter Palo Duro, overlook the rim of
its eight-hundred-foot abyss, at the bottom of which,
a narrow ribbon of lush
cottonwood awaits you: the alternative, you ask—a slow suffocation though no one will
describe that for you.
On my first day of work as an X-ray tech,
I asked Miguel about KV and MAS. He shook his head,
said let’s not make this any harder than it has to be.
When I asked about radiation and photons, he
said just push the button with the red X. But when I asked
about his family, he called me Papi, pulled out his wallet
and family photos, started telling me about his wife Anna,
and his daughters, Claire and Isabella, and we talked for hours.
Smith Surgery
Murray Whitehill
60
61
Martha Kaplan
Michael Adams
A Surgeon’s Geography
Fireflies
Her brain is open
on the table
and she is conscious
talking with the surgeon
you can hear their voices on the tape
as the camera focuses on the tiny stimulator
that touches on the surface
of the gray matter:
here, she weeps
there, she is joyous
here, she loses speech
there, it returns
one moment her words are clear, focused
at the next, her words confused
she is lost, muddled
62
her tongue thick
and struggling
this is a surgeon’s geography
mountains and valleys
elusive regions of eloquent cortex
complex neurological pathways
a cartographer’s challenge
think the mapping of movement
horizontally
think the mapping of curved space
reduced to squares, lines
think what can be touched
what is certain
and what is not
The hard light of day goes soft and long
as the sun goes from Wichita, west
below the curve of the earth, and other
lights, few and tentative at first, not stars
but star-like, appear amongst the trees
of the shelter belt. And as the first true stars
come out, the lights, the living lights, become bolder,
venturing out onto the verge of prairie
fronting the highway, and others appear,
as if coalescing from the thick air.
It’s been many years since I last saw these brave
luminous lovers that filled summer evenings, years since I left
the soft breathing hills of Pennsylvania for the sun-washed bones
and peaks of Colorado.
They stake everything on this night, these small creatures,
and my heart goes out to them, already sensing the stirring of the bats,
swift and deadly amongst the trees. I think our world is no less fragile
than theirs, and we are just as foolish as they to venture forth
into the red reach of life.
But if we choose not this boldness, never to venture forth,
but to remain always hidden, have we lived at all?
Come with me. I want to show you this night, force your door,
kick out the jams, throw open all the windows and lead you out
into this June field so that you will see all of this brave dance,
this so short, impossible beautiful life.
63
Formation of Identity contest winner—Prose
This idea of identity changes for each of
us all the time. And there is, perhaps,
no greater time of questioning who we
are than when we are suddenly sick.
Like the character in “He Was Henry
Hudson,” the experience of illness throws
us into a tailspin, requiring of us a new
interpretation of ourselves in this world
that seems, without warning, to be so
different.
In this story, Linda Chase tosses us
directly into the churning water—Henry
Hudson navigating the mighty river.
What I love most about this piece is how
this introduction mimics the experience
that is then described: the unreal reality
of having a stroke, the way the injured
brain contorts events into metaphor
that makes this tragedy meaningful,
metaphor that even becomes
therapeutic. As the story progresses, the
writer keeps us just the slightest bit off
balance and leaves us in that allegorical
place, searching for the pinprick of light
that we hope will guide us back to a
more familiar sense of ourselves.
—LK
64
Linda Chase
He Was Henry Hudson
He was Henry Hudson, navigating the
mighty river, heading north. He loved
this river. His river. The sheer power of
it, the expanse. The night was coal black.
A thick darkness cloaked the banks that
rose on either side, steep as cliffs. He
felt them breathing like living things.
He could not see the way forward but
he felt his hand steady on the helm. He
must stay the course. The land was a
force, and the night was a force, but the
force of the river was stronger. Wilder,
deeper. Fathoms deep that could not be
fathomed. The sails snapped taut in the
brisk wind. He felt the speed like a pulse,
his heart beating at one with the motion.
Steady ahead, moving swiftly, the strong
river current driving them on, urging
them north toward Albany. He could
feel its lulling cadence beneath him. True
north, true north, true north. But no.
A worry flickered like a hazy, indistinct
constellation. It was now, it was then. He
was lying on his back. He was the captain of the ship. Now was then. Then was
now. He was Henry Hudson on a great
voyage up the mighty river: he was lying
on his back, the ambulance tires thrumming beneath him. Where was the North
Star? Something nagged, something
about the current. Didn’t the current
run south? Thoughts traveled light years
through the synapses of his brain, dying
stars that were gone before they arrived.
Where was true north? How would he
know when he had found it?
It had seemed a normal day. Tom was
in his studio in the barn, putting in
long hours as he always did, working
on the final painting for his upcoming
New York show. I had gone to town in
the late afternoon to buy groceries, and
he came in while I was unpacking the
bags. He must have been listening for
the car, I think when I see him, because
he is usually oblivious to the outside
world when he’s painting. I often tease
him that someone could back a truck
up to the front door and load up all the
furniture and he wouldn’t even notice,
but as I glance at him now, he doesn’t
look in the mood for teasing. Something strange happened while I was
gone, he tells me. A stock broker called,
of all things. He could hear the man on
the other end of the line but he couldn’t
answer. He knew what he wanted to
say but his mouth wouldn’t form the
words. “If the guy knew how little we
have to invest, he wouldn’t have been
wasting his time,” he says, forcing a
laugh, trying to make light of it. “Anyway, I feel fine now. I felt fine then. I
just couldn’t talk. It was weird.”
He is speaking perfectly clearly as
he says this. We stare at each other
for a couple of minutes, not knowing
what to think. I have bought a cooked
chicken and some coleslaw so we set
the table and sit down to eat. We know
we should take this episode seriously,
whatever it is, but we don’t want to
panic. Could he be having a stroke or
something? We have a general idea of
what a stroke is but have never paid
much attention to the symptoms. It is
one of those things that didn’t seem to
have anything to do with us. This is before we have come to know all the signs
of stroke by heart, before we have read
or even noticed those posters in every
hospital corridor and doctor’s waiting
room. The ones that tell you to Call
911 immediately if you experience any
of the following symptoms—sudden
trouble speaking, we know now, is high
on the list. We are young, or at least we
still think of ourselves that way, and
have hardly given stroke a thought.
Besides, Tom is a runner who does four
miles almost every day. At sixty-one he
has the blood pressure and cholesterol
of a man in his forties. And if it was a
stroke, how could he be so lucid now?
These are the things we tell each other,
attempts at reassurance, so maybe
we know more about strokes than we
think we do. Just not enough.
Still, I do call the doctor, getting the
machine because it is after office hours.
I leave a message, thinking all the while
that I am probably being alarmist. So
we sit down to eat, a little worried, sure,
but not worried enough to consider
rushing off to the emergency room.
Not as worried as we should be. And
then Tom drops his fork. He is raising
it to his mouth about to take a bite, and
it just slips from his hand. It lands on
the plate with a clang that makes us
both jump—literally lift off our seats
like cartoon characters. Our eyes catch.
We know this
He was the captain
is bad. He picks
of the ship. Now
the fork up again
was then. Then
but can’t make
was now.
his fingers hold
on to it. “I don’t
think we should wait for Dr. Collins
to call back,” I say, but just then the
phone rings. “Call an ambulance right
away,” she says when I describe what is
happening.
65
We are sitting at the round table in
the bay window; the phone is above
the kitchen counter by the door. I turn
back to Tom and see him starting to tilt
sideways off the chair. There is the barest
hesitation, and then his body starts
toppling, rigid as a tree being felled. I
drop the phone and rush over to break
the fall. He has suddenly become a dead
weight, so heavy that I can barely keep
him propped up. But I have to make
the 911 call. I stretch out my arms and
am just able to
While ignorance in keep one hand
this case is certainly supporting him
not bliss, it is at least while I reach for
a blessing. the phone with
the other. It isn’t
a cordless but at least the numbers are
on the handset so that’s a help. Once I
have it in my hand I can just pull it out
far enough from the wall to dial while I
lean against Tom to keep him up. It’s a
weird balancing act. If I drop the phone
I will not be able to get it again without
letting him go.
We live in a very remote rural area.
The hospital is at least nine miles away.
66
Our house is on an obscure winding
road, notoriously difficult to find. My
friend Dorothy lives halfway between
us and the hospital, and the ambulance
will have to drive right by her house,
so I hang onto the phone and call and
tell her what happened and get her to
watch for it and flag it down and make
sure it gets here. My hands free now,
I put both my arms around Tom and
lean against him so he won’t collapse
to the floor. “It’s okay, the ambulance is
coming,” I tell him. The kind of meaningless soothing words you say to a
child—to yourself. He can’t speak, and
I don’t know if he hears or understands
me. He seems lost somehow but there
is flicker of fear in his eyes that I want
to assuage. At least his eyes don’t look
completely blank, I think, telling myself
that this is a good sign.
It’s another half hour at least before
the ambulance arrives. The paramedics quickly wheel a gurney into the
kitchen, place Tom on it, and wheel
him out. Despite what you see on all
those shows on TV, they won’t let me
ride with him, so I squeeze his hand
and tell him again it will be alright,
still not sure what of all this he comprehends. It all seems far too unreal
to even begin to imagine what alright
might mean.
The next hours are a blur of anxiety.
The small local hospital is not equipped
to deal with stroke patients but has to
process him into the system anyway.
He needs to be airlifted to Albany, they
say, and so we wait for the helicopter
that ultimately can’t land due to heavy
fog, and then for another ambulance
that is licensed to take him the two
hours to Albany General. I have no
idea, as I get into Dorothy’s car, that
time is in any way crucial. While
ignorance in this case is certainly not
bliss, it is at least a blessing, since I
am helpless to make any of this move
faster. We can’t follow the ambulance
because, after all this waiting, it takes
off too fast. We naturally assume they
will get to the hospital ahead of us, but
when we arrive the admissions nurse
tells us she has no record of Tom or of
any patient arriving by ambulance.
“But you are expecting him, right?”
I say. “The hospital in Margaretville
said they called ahead so the doctors
would be ready.” She has no record
of such a patient or any such call, she
insists. We should have a seat and wait.
We sit down but I get up almost
instantly. The ambulance definitely should have gotten here by now,
and I don’t understand why there is
no record of the other hospital’s call.
Dorothy follows me outside to watch
for its arrival. More waiting and pacing,
and I am truly getting frantic. I go back
inside and ask the nurse behind her
protective glass to check again, and she
repeats her assertion that there is no
such patient listed, her annoyance palpable. There is a pair of double swinging doors next to this admitting office,
and I can glimpse the treatment area
through their small square glass panes.
Whether it’s intuition or just frustration
that impels me, I push the doors open
and, against the nurse’s protest, rush inside. It seems to be just one large room
with several rows of gurneys, most of
them unoccupied, and then I see Tom
on a stretcher being pushed through
another set of doors around the corner
by a burly man in green scrubs.
“I’ve been going crazy waiting. Why
didn’t anyone tell me he was here?”
I say to one of the nurses standing
nearby.
“Are you the wife, then?” she asks,
without any hint of apology. “Well it’s
a good thing you got here. He’s been
to radiology and they’ll be wanting
to move him up to a room upstairs
soon, and I need you to fill out some
paperwork.” So he has been here
awhile, although no one thought to let
the emergency room admitting office
know. I want to scream in anger and
frustration, but I don’t want to upset
Tom. I’m not much good at screaming
anyway, so I go over and stand next
to him and stroke his arm. He looks
calm. His eyes rest on me with seeming
recognition but without any apparent sense of relief, so I guess he has
not been frightened or worried about
where I was. At least that is something,
but it is also scary. If he doesn’t know
the trouble he is in, what does that say
about his brain function? Is he in some
kind of coma, or just zoned out? There
is definitely a disconnect. Maybe it is
just some self-protective mechanism
the brain has. Some kind of automatic
shut-down, like a computer that freezes
when it gets too much conflicting
input. I suddenly get a vision of the
“Fatal Error” message that would flash
on the screen of my old IBM when I hit
some mysterious combination of keys
that forced it to crash—a drastic and
startling message even in reference to
a machine. I don’t have time to dwell
on this, however, because the man who
was pushing Tom’s stretcher comes
striding up.
“You are wife?” he demands. His
face, aggressively close to mine, is ruddy, and his hair, the color and texture of
wet straw, juts wildly around his ears.
“Massive stroke,” he says when I
nod. “We look at picture. CAT scan.”
At least I think that is what he says.
His accent, clearly Russian, is so thick
I can barely make out the words. I
think he is saying something about the
parts of the brain, but I can’t be sure.
“What?” I say. “I don’t understand.”
67
He presses even closer, his whole
body hovering belligerently. “Massive
stroke,” he says again, waving his arm
dismissively over Tom’s inert form.
“Massive.” That part is very clear.
I look around and see the nurse I
had spoken to before standing off to the
side. “Can you explain what he’s saying?
I can’t understand him. His accent’s
too heavy.” I am trying to speak quietly,
but he has apparently been listening
for the complaint and has homed in on
my voice like a radio scanner tracking
a frequency. He is immediately beside us, on top of us, waving his arms.
“What do you mean? Why do you say
that? You want I
“He raised his finger,” should be fired?
I call out to the I speak well. You
doctor. “I saw it.” are problem.”
With his red
scrunched-up face, heavy accent, and
childish grammar he is like a Robin
Williams caricature of a Russian doctor.
If this were a movie I would be laughing.
I don’t want to risk Tom’s care by
alienating this doctor—if that’s what
he is—any further, so I mutter an
68
apology and go back to stand next to
Tom. Fortunately, Tom seems not to
have noticed any of this. “Paralyzed.
Not move. Very bad,” the Russian
pronounces from across the room, and
with another dramatic wave of his arms
he pushes through the double doors.
In the calm that follows I lean down
and speak quietly in Tom’s ear. “You
know you have had a stroke,” I say. I’m
not sure if telling him is the right thing
to do. I only know that if it were me I
would want to know. If there is any part
of his brain that is aware enough to be
confused about what happened to him,
then he is be better off knowing at least
that much.
Now I am sitting by Tom’s bed
where he lies asleep. He is hooked up to
an IV pole, and the metal bed railings
are up so he won’t roll over and fall out.
There is no possibility of lying next to
him and holding him or even sitting
next to him on the bed, so I reach
through the bars and hold his hand. It
is impossible to know what will happen
next. The first twenty-four to fortyeight hours are the most critical, the
admitting intern has advised me. There
could be another stroke, or the damage
to the brain could continue. There is
nothing to do but watch and wait. If we
had gotten to a hospital with the right
facilities soon enough, they might have
been able to give him blood thinners,
which could have reduced the severity
of the damage, but the window of opportunity for that kind of treatment is
only three hours. Any intervention now
would be too risky. If he has another
stroke there is nothing they can do to
stop it.
I have sent Dorothy home. She
will come back tomorrow and bring
whatever I need. I have no intention
of leaving Tom alone. There is a hard,
plastic-covered reclining chair next to
the bed. One of the night nurses has
brought me a pillow and a blanket, and
I lean it back as far as it goes and try
to sleep. Exhaustion fights with fear. I
doze and wake, doze and wake, twisting on the harsh scratchy surface. Every
few minutes I sit up and look over at
Tom, searching for the rise and fall of
his breathing.
What if this is it? What if he doesn’t
recover at all? I am terrified for him but
so grateful he is alive, and I hope I am
not being selfish. He is still here; that
is the consolation I am holding onto
through this terrible night, and I have
to believe it will be a consolation to
him too. Yet I know if Tom could speak
to me now, he would say unequivocally
that he would rather be dead than alive
and totally paralyzed for the rest of his
life, that for him a life of helplessness,
a life in which he couldn’t paint, would
be no life at all. It is way too soon for
such thoughts, I tell myself. Too soon
for fear, too soon for hope. Too soon
for denial, too soon for acceptance.
I hold in my mind the Tom I know,
the Tom who has always had so much
energy—energy for work and love, and
nervous energy too. So much nervous
energy that he could barely sit still,
tapping his foot unnervingly on the gas
pedal when he drove, and incessantly
drumming his fingers on whatever
hard surface was around, rhythmically
tapping out streams of words in the
Morse Code he had learned during his
stint in the Navy, his speed at the keys
making him a crack radio operator.
I look at him now and, physically at
least, it is like looking at a different person. It isn’t just that his arms lie limply
on the stiff sheets, drained not only of
energy but seemingly of life itself. They
seem to have actually shrunk, withered.
He looks like someone who has been
lying immobile in a hospital bed for
weeks or months not merely hours.
How can such a transformation happen
so quickly? Can it really be that it is
only the electrical impulses from the
brain that keep the muscles taut? Or
is it some kind of reaction of the body
to the trauma of the stroke? In its own
way this diminishing is as shocking as
his inability to move or speak.
It is after ten the next morning
when Dr. Abramowitz, the neurologist, arrives. A tall man with a small
goatee and thinning dark hair combed
back from his forehead, he looks like a
nineteenth-century European intellectual, but he exudes a twentieth-century fit, compact energy. Blessedly,
he speaks perfect English and seems
reassuringly sane, even kindly. He
asks Tom to lift each hand and each
leg in turn, although it is immediately
clear that Tom cannot comply. Then
he approaches the bed and gently lifts
each hand and lets it drop back down.
After this, he takes a pin and pricks
Tom’s finger. “Do you feel that?” Tom
shakes his head, a small movement but
enough to indicate a no. He doesn’t feel
any of the pin pricks, but he can move
his head, and there is no doubt he
understands what the doctor is asking.
“Do you know where you are?” the
doctor asks next. Tom nods this time
and looks like he would like to answer
but doesn’t try to speak. “Do you know
what year it is?” The same nod. There
is no point going on with this series of
questions, a series we will soon come
to learn so well, designed to test the
patient’s orientation to time and place.
He picks up Tom’s chart from its place
at the end of the bed and reads it.
Blood pressure: 110 over 70. Resting
heart rate: 60. “You’re in better shape
than I am,” he says with a straight face
but clearly aware of the irony.
69
Tom has had an ischemic stroke, he
explains, as opposed to a hemorrhagic stroke that would involve a bleed
in the brain. The right carotid artery
appears to be completely blocked,
cutting off blood flow to the right
side of his brain. As we just saw, he is
almost completely paralyzed and has
no feeling in his hands or feet. Since
the stroke was on the right side of his
brain, it will primarily affect the left
side of his body. If he lives, there is a
good chance he will regain some, or
possibly all, use of his right side. It is
too soon to know if the speech areas
of the brain have been permanently
affected or if he will regain any functionality on his left side. The good
news: he is still young and obviously
in good shape, and that should help
his recovery. “I don’t want to mislead
you. The CAT scan showed extensive
damage to the brain. When the blood
supply to the brain is cut off, the brain
dies. Cells that have died are gone;
they do not regenerate. Sometimes
the brain can learn to compensate for
some of this loss. It’s too soon to know
70
the true extent of the damage much
less how much recovery is possible.”
He isn’t ruling anything out, the doctor says, but he doesn’t want me to expect too much. Those words “massive
stroke” keep replaying in my head.
“If he’s in such good shape, why did
this happen?” I can’t help asking, but
the doctor has no answer to that.
Tom has been watching us through
all this but it is unclear how much he
has heard or understood. His arms are
still lying lifeless outside the covers,
and I am thinking about what the
doctor has just said about his condition, and then I suddenly see the index
finger of his right hand lift off the sheet.
“He raised his finger,” I call out to
the doctor. “I saw it.”
Dr. Abramowitz comes back in and
stands behind the bed. “Do it again,
Tom,” I say. “Do what you just did.
Move your finger.”
It takes a few seconds. You can see
the concentration in his face as the
thought gets routed from his brain to
his finger, but then there it is, the slight
but unmistakable movement. Then he
does it again, lifting it a little higher the
second time.
“This is really excellent,” the doctor
says. “Any improvement in the first
forty-eight hours is a good sign. And
this isn’t even twenty-four. We still
don’t know what the outcome will be,
but as a general rule the stroke patients
who show improvement in the early
stages have the best recovery outcomes.
I don’t want to mislead you, but this is a
good sign. Really encouraging.”
It’s strange how some moments
impress themselves so vividly on your
consciousness while others just as
crucial seem to slip by. I can picture the
exact motion of Tom’s finger as he lifted
it a half inch off the starched white
sheet of that hospital bed, but I can’t
recall the exact moment when he started to speak again, even though that
would seem an even more momentous
occurrence. Perhaps this is because the
ability to move at all was the first sign
of hope; the fact that he repeated it for
Dr. Abramowitz proved beyond question that he both heard and understood
us. Maybe the leap from understanding
to speaking didn’t seem so amazing.
Or maybe I was suffering some combination of shock and exhaustion that
prevented me from registering his first
attempts at speech. Maybe I had asked
him, as I did so many times, if he was
in pain. Or maybe I asked if he understood what had happened, if he knew
he’d had a stroke, and maybe instead of
nodding he mouthed the word yes.
Maybe I wipe his first words out
of my mind even as Tom speaks them
because they are so painful to watch.
As he starts to gain movement on his
right side throughout the day, his left
side remains completely paralyzed. The
left side of his face droops, flaccid and
immobile. His first attempts at speech
are garbled and barely comprehensible,
and worse than the sight of his drooping face is the distress in his eyes as he
struggles to get the words out. More
than the paralysis, his difficulty speaking brings home to him the truth of his
condition; it is the first evidence that
his brain cannot ignore.
By the time Dr. Abramowitz
makes his morning rounds the sec-
ond day, Tom is managing to speak
well enough to try to answer the classic roster of questions. “Do you know
what year it is?”
It’s something of a tongue twister but
he gets it out: “Nineteen ninety-nine.”
The doctor is obviously pleased. You
can see it in his eyes, though he keeps
a straight face. “Do you know where
you are?” Tom nods. “Wish I didn’t,” he
mouths, managing a hint of a lopsided smile. “Okay, but where is it?” I’m
surprised and delighted by this flash
of humor but the doctor wants to be
sure Tom knows the right answer. It is
unclear if he even thinks of the humor
as a good sign. We will soon learn
that no matter how many times these
same questions are asked, the doctors
want them to be answered correctly so
the answers can be checked off on the
chart. “Albany Hospital,” Tom manages,
chastened. “Good,” the doctor pronounces, though I can’t tell if he is as
impressed as I am that Tom does really
know exactly where he is.
It is another day before they get
Tom into a wheelchair and allow me to
wheel him out into the hall. There is a
small seating area next to a large window. We are on the twelfth floor, higher
than most of the buildings in the medical complex,
so the view is
We are on the
mostly blue sky.
twelfth floor, higher
In his two-bed
than most of the
room, Tom was
buildings in the
in the bed nearmedical complex, so
est the door, and
the view is mostly
with the other
blue sky.
patient’s curtain
pulled closed it
was impossible to even see the window.
We could barely tell if it was day or
night, not that it seemed to matter. But
now the glimpse of the outside seems
to perk Tom up. “Henry Hudson,” he
says. His speech is still difficult to decipher, slow and slurred as if his tongue
is too thick, so he has to say it a couple
of times before I understand the meaning. “I was Henry Hudson.”
“You mean you were dreaming?”
He shakes his head. “I was him.”
I don’t know if it is seeing the sky, or
sitting up for the first time, or just the
71
fact that enough time has elapsed for
his brain to begin to grasp where he is
and what he has been through, but suddenly he wants to explain it. Despite his
struggles with forming the words and
frustration that he can’t get it all out
fast enough, he is in a hurry to share
it with me. “We were sailing up the
Hudson,” he states, as emphatically as
his speech deficits allow. Then he must
pick up on my distress and confusion,
my fear that his brain is not working
right after all, because he looks me in
the eyes and adds, “I know I was in
the ambulance, but I was him, sailing
north.” He is so pleased with himself—so pleased that he has been able
describe his experience, and so pleased
with the memory. “It was amazing.”
He will tell this story over and over
again in the days that follow. Clarifying it, reiterating the sense of reality it
had, wanting me to know how detailed
and elaborate his concept was. He
wasn’t just sailing up the Hudson, he
was the captain of the ship, concerned
about his men. They were counting on
him. He knew he needed to navigate
72
by the stars, but it was too dark. Dr.
Abramowitz has tried to prepare us
both for the future. He has told Tom
he may never walk again, and that it
is unlikely he will ever be able to paint
again. But fortunately Tom hasn’t been
listening to any of that yet. He is still on
the ship navigating the mighty river.
I have no idea what to make of this
fantasy, and I don’t know if it is good
to encourage it, but he clearly enjoys
remembering it and talking about it,
and it’s wonderful that he is talking at
all. I try to be logical about it, to think
where the idea would have come from.
The New York Thruway does run north
along the Hudson, and we know that
was the route the ambulance took, but
how could Tom possibly have known
that given the condition he was in? He
was flat on his back hooked up to monitors, so he couldn’t see out the window.
And even if he could have, even sitting
up in a car, there is no place you can
actually see the river from the thruway.
He is something of a history buff, but
as far as I know he hadn’t been reading
any books about Henry Hudson or
the river or the history of New York
State. I can’t remember a movie or PBS
special that might have triggered it. We
do drive over the river occasionally,
taking the Rhinecliff Bridge to dinner
in Rhinebeck or driving to visit my
brother in Connecticut, commenting
on how beautiful and majestic it is, but
we haven’t even done that in months.
It is easy to assume that the ship
Tom was captain of was his own body,
that his inability to navigate and his
fear of leading the ship aground are
perfect metaphors for his condition.
But that seems too pat. There is something deeper in the poetry of his vision.
I was so afraid that he was afraid as I
rode in the car, making my own trip
north that night. I was afraid he was
feeling lost and alone and abandoned
and maybe in pain. But he was in a
better world. He was Henry Hudson,
sailing up the mighty river, scanning
the heavens, searching the celestial
hemisphere of his brain for the bright
pinprick of light that would be his
North Star.
Mother at 92
Harrison O’Connor
73
John Casey
My gift was guessing
I.
My gift was guessing. I saw the invisible letters
In the faded word where the ink thinned on the nib
Or where a right-hand margin had rotted from
Centuries of monks’ thumbings. I wore white gloves.
We know the Gospels. No need to guess. I read
Chronicles scratched in Latin that was neither
A mother-tongue to the chronicler nor me.
Word by word I’d learn his style of writing—
His stylus I should say. How literal my view:
Ascenders, descenders, the cold squeeze or globed
Ripeness of his half-uncials. Then a blank.
I waited in the dark. I cannot say
That I was patient. Patience, like bravery, is a virtue
For one who doubts the outcome and persists.
I only waited, daydreaming á la Proust.
With the same alertness that he surely felt
When he heard the clink of a spoon against a saucer
And knew that he was about to begin to remember.
The Northmen’s boats…the Northmen’s boats…did what
74
Upon the shore? An s, an illegible inch,
Nothing more…Sibillaverunt.
They hissed. I’m sure. Spectography confirms
Only the tops of the b, the l and the t.
What else could it be? The ships came sailing silently
Out of a white fog, then hissed on shore.
My monk is fanciful but true to sound. And sight.
The long boats’ upcurved stems are dragons’ heads.
That was an easy one. I’ve mused on pages that had
As many lacunae as words and arced the gaps.
I remember how my senses hovered
Over the vellum, not just seeing but hearing
Murmurs—my brother monk mouthing the words,
Lifting and pressing his pen and lip simulatur.
II.
It wasn’t a stroke. That was still to come.
It wasn’t a stroke—it was just that one day
I couldn’t do it. What I’d done with ease
Didn’t become more difficult; it stopped.
I kept on knowing dead things I already knew
But not the joy of words coming back to life.
The slow diminishing that followed disturbed me less.
Perhaps my fear of death is also less,
Perhaps by paying that loss in middle age
My timor-mortis-conturbat-me was deadened.
III.
Here’s how I know what is going on: a nurse
Comes on at night. She speaks a sing-song English,
Not her mother’s tongue. Her full-moon face
Is Chinese. She hears every word I say—
Or try to say. Perhaps she reads my lips,
Perhaps she’s good at guessing. She knew I laughed.
“You laugh. That good. You still see what funny.”
She knows my favorite juice, she brings the cup
Although I barely pull my lips apart
To make a “pah”. She says, “You like papaya.
Good, good. Papaya good for you.”
She reads my eyes—“You sleepy.” I close my eyes
To let her rest. Why is she reading me?
I thought at first that she’s reading me to mark the end,
An ornament of figure-ground reversal.
That’s what made me laugh. I’ve changed my mind.
Why is she reading me? Because it is her gift.
The Northmen’s boats flowed into words and faded.
Did it matter whether they were found once more?
Not the fact of boats but on what word
The chronicler floated them on shore.
Not papaya, but the grace of being heard.
75
Laura Foley
Film Noir
Kids at Art
In Paris with my professor,
and his shy teenage son,
not much younger than I,
whose presence I try
to fence from my awareness.
Our apartment’s an atelier,
our courtyard shaded
with Trees of Heaven
I look down on
before descending
the new brass elevator,
clanging through
the ancient stairwell’s
Stygian depths
to sip bitter espresso
and smoke filter-less cigarettes
as if I were born doing it,
all that summer,
pretending I’m someone else.
Murray Whitehill
76
77
Kendra Kopelke
Our Urologist
Looks like a grenade exploded in your bladder,
Dr. Z chants in the chilly examining room
after the catheter comes out.
Looks like a bomb went off in your bladder—
he announces in the recovery room in his green scrubs,
across my husband’s groggy body.
Looks like a bomb went off in your bladder,
he intones to the four walls in his sterile, shared office,
well hung with diplomas bearing different names,
Art at the High
our own private, wartime poet, armed with
one metaphor, one hackneyed phrase, and chemicals.
Lance Buckley
78
79
Kendra Kopelke
Pointing The Finger
The bladder is not
to blame,
the mitamycin
is to blame,
and before
that,
BCG, or
bovine tuberculosis,
and
before that,
cancer,
and before that
the doctor who
80
diagnosed you
and before that
the other doctor
who misdiagnosed
you and before
that, radon, grilling,
Baltimore,
and before that
me,
of course,
and before that,
family history,
dumb luck,
the country we swim in
pumped full
of chemicals.
My finger is almost
as red and
tired
as his bladder
having pointed itself
to death.
It has poked
suspiciously
at the poisonous
world,
taken inventory
even in my sleep,
testing each thing
to see
which makes
the most
sense, looking
for the foot
that fits this
shoe.
What or who
did this to you?
Oh, but I wonder,
what is the point?
To increase suffering?
Invite more guilt?
Deepen regret?
If only you hadn’t
worked
in the leather factory?
But you never worked
in the leather factory!
If only you had worked
in the leather factory
and smoked
a few cigarettes
along the way,
so we could, for that brief
surreal stint in the doctor’s
tiny cockpit, sigh
ohhhh that
before taking off
to points
unknown.
81
Marsha Roberts
Tweaking Fate
82
Sunset Mountain
Armando Huaringa
My mom is sitting across from me at Starbucks, waiting for
her life to change. Of course, she doesn’t know that’s why
she’s here. On the contrary, she’s completely absorbed in her
lemon ginger pound cake—has undone the button at her
waist, in fact, to welcome it.
We’re both understatedly cool in all-black—my mother,
because it’s the de rigueur ensemble for 81-year-old Italian
widows. And me, because I’ve lived in San Francisco forever
and, as everyone but the odd tourist from Pennsylvania knows,
that’s all we wear here. Our personalities are colorful enough.
She’s pissed off about her appearance, of course. Before
leaving her house, she checked herself out in the hallway
mirror and scowled, as usual. Her sparse, gauze-like hair
wouldn’t cover all of her pale pink scalp no matter how much
she played with it. The collar of her black sweater didn’t
cooperate either, refusing to stretch and hide more of her
chicken neck. A little makeup would have helped, but I was
unsuccessful in that department today. It’s important to celebrate the small victories, though. She agreed to go out. And
her life is about to take a turn for the rosier.
The coffee shop is pretty quiet; most of the tables are empty. But not the one that counts. I slip a look at it. It’s zero hour.
“Mom, I think that guy over there is checking you out!”
My timing isn’t ideal. She’s just angling her fork toward
the creamy, lemon rind-flecked filling, going in for the kill.
Her murky blue eyes look up at
me, more clouded than usuSubtlety is one of the
al. My real mom used to be in
first things to go. It drifts
those eyes. I’d like to see her
away…well, subtly.
more often—at least a wisp every now and then would be nice.
“What are you talking about?” Her eyebrows shoot up too
far, as though I’m the one who’s nuts.
“That man over there, in the tweedy jacket, sitting by himself,” I say, pointing with my nose. “He’s been staring at you
ever since we sat down.”
She turns to look at him—flat out gawks. Subtlety is one of
the first things to go. It drifts away…well, subtly.
He’s in his early eighties. His white hair is combed
straight back in thin cords that have a faint sheen—
83
Brylcreem, probably. He is peering at his paper through
perfectly round, horn-rimmed glasses—when he isn’t
sneaking a peek at her, that is. His lips are full and generous,
the kind that would bite right into a fresh peach and not
mind the juice running down.
“Don’t be silly.” She turns back
He weaves the details to me. “I am too old for a man to
I give him into memories be interested in me.” She strings
even I begin to believe. out the “o-o-o-ld.” “Men like
him, they are looking for younger women…nobody wants an o-o-o-ld lady like me.” She
goes back to her cake.
He stands up, folds his paper, and walks toward us.
“Mom, he’s coming this way!”
She ignores me, or doesn’t hear me, I’m not sure which.
Then again, not many men can compete with the sweet, tart
feel of lemon frosting in your mouth, so she probably has a
point.
“Excuse me, ladies.” He is hovering at our table, his voice
a cheery lilt. “I’m very sorry to bother you, but you look so
much like my old neighbor back in Silver Spring, Maryland,
I just had to stop and see if it was really you. Are you Gina
Giordani?” His eyes are a gentle, dark brown, and they are
fixed on my mother.
Her sleepy face jars into recognition. “Yes, yes…I’m
Gina Giordani.” She says it as though just realizing it herself,
emphasizing the syllables with that melodic accent she has
managed to keep sixty years after leaving the old country.
84
“I’m Carl O’Donohue. Remember me, from Linden View
Drive?” He has the kindest face.
“Carl!” Her lips form a perfect smile, but her eyes are lost.
“You used to play canasta with my wife, Shirley.”
“Oh, Shirley, yes!” She nods vigorously and leans forward.
“How is Shirley?”
I invite him to join us, and he pulls over a chair. He
squeezes his hulk of a frame between us and brings with it
an air of warmth that wasn’t there before. And also a tinge of
something else from way back when—Old Spice.
“I’m afraid Shirley passed away five years ago. Cancer,” he
says.
She sinks back in her chair with a soft moan. “Oh, I am so
sorry. She was wonderful, Shirley. When Henry brought me
to America, I didn’t know anyone. Shirley would invite me
over for coffee. She introduced me to the other ladies in the
neighborhood. And she taught me how to play canasta. We
had a wonderful time. Each of us would take turns bringing
some dessert. They always asked me to bring my tiramisu. I
used to make tiramisu from scratch, you know, my mother’s recipe. And we would talk and talk. Shirley was my first
friend in America. I am so sorry that I lost touch. And how is
she doing?”
Carl repeats his answer and then looks at me, pulling back
until I’m in focus. “Let’s see, you must be Margaret?”
“Yes. I go by ‘Maggie’ now.”
“I remember we could see you out our kitchen window,
swinging on your swing-set.” He turns back to her. “And
Henry? How is he?”
For a moment, she leaves us and floats into the past where
my dad lives. Her creases soften. “Henry died….” Her eyes
search mine. “How many years ago?”
“Also five years ago. Also cancer.”
Carl’s head sinks with the weight of one who knows what
it’s like. “Henry was such a good man.” There is an awkward
pause, while we each struggle in our own way to find a graceful segue. Carl gazes out the window, watching a scene only
he can see. Slowly, a grin begins to form. “I remember when
Henry and I were ushers together at Our Lady of Mercy. This
one time, a teen-aged girl came in late, wearing a very short
mini-dress—strapless, no less. Henry was beside himself. He
took it as an insult to the church and everything it stood for.
He went right up to her pew, whispered to her that she was
inappropriately attired for the service and escorted her out
on the spot. I don’t know whose face was more scarlet—hers
or his!”
Carl was chuckling out loud now. And so was Mom.
“Yes, yes, he was very strict, very proper, but a very good
man. I miss him.” She studied her lap.
I excuse myself to let them talk. A half-hour later, when
I return, they are hunched over the table, deep in stories of
the past. My mom is pointing her finger at him, her lips wide
with glee.
“You are right!”
“Right about what?” I ask.
“Oh, you know, everything. He is right about everything!”
I don’t press—I know she can go no further. Instead, I play
my part. “Unfortunately, Mom, we have to get going now.”
Carl steps right in. “Gina, I’d love to get together some
time, if you’d like. It’s so nice to be able to talk with an old
friend. The truth is, I don’t know many people here.” His
lively eyes dance under the thick white forest of his brows. “I
found this great Northern Italian restaurant near here. They
make the best tiramisu. Well, not as good as yours. Would
you like to go there with me sometime?”
“Oh!” She starts playing with her necklace, the one with the
mango and banana colored beads with shiny crystals in between. It’s not the worst necklace she owns. It’s the third worst.
It’s twirling in her hand now—a hand with too many bones
and veins. I nod and wink in encouragement. It doesn’t work.
Now she is stammering “I, uh… I, uh …” This is moving
too fast. I should have known better.
“Tell you what…” I jump in. “My mom and I come here for
coffee all the time. How about if we meet you here on Thursday, at two o’clock?”
And that’s how it starts, at least as far as she is concerned.
We meet every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon at Starbucks
for three weeks. Carl is Oscar worthy. He weaves the details I
give him into memories even I begin to believe. And he does
it with heart.
And she…well, at first of course, she doesn’t even remember meeting him. Not ten minutes after getting home
that first Tuesday, she asks me why we never go to Starbucks
anymore. And that sets her off into her standard complaint
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that I never take her anywhere. I remind her that we go out
together at least three times a week.
“No, we don’t! Maybe once a month—maybe…if you have
time.”
It’s useless to argue, I’ve finally mastered that lesson. So I
try to change the subject. But she won’t let it go. She ups the
ante, moving on to one of her favorite taunts. “You are so
selfish, you know.” She draws
It’s the illness, out the “sellllll-fish,” winding
I try to convince myself. her tongue around it like a
It’s not really her. noose. “You didn’t have children because you are selfish,
and now you don’t want to spend time with me because you
are selfish.”
No matter how many times I hear it, it never loses its sting.
The unfairness just boils there at the top of my throat, wanting
to bust out and set her straight. It’s the illness, I try to convince
myself. It’s not really her. But I’m afraid I know better.
For the next couple of weeks, I show up early each Tuesday and Thursday to help her prepare for our date with Carl.
Each time, it’s like starting from scratch. I have to talk her
into going and remind her several times who he is and why
we are getting together with him. When we arrive at Starbucks, the conversation between them is always the same, a
virtual word-for-word replay of that first one.
But the third Thursday is different. I get to her house an
hour early as usual. When she answers the door, I do a double take. She’s all made up, dressed, and ready to go.
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“Wow, Mom, you’re ready!” What was that I said before
about subtlety? Maybe it’s catching.
There is a glint of my real mom in her eyes, the one who
enjoyed the attention of men and was a bit flirty with them.
“We are going to see Carl, no?”
She remembers Carl’s name! I watch as she reaches for her
lipstick. She pulls off the cap and nods at the pale coral hue
as it emerges from the tube. A relief—some days no color is
right. She squints into the mirror, her forehead scrunching,
as usual, at what she sees. She stretches her mouth into a
distorted smile and, with a wobbly stroke, smoothes the tube
over her lips, over the boundaries of where they end, making
them as luscious and ripe as she wishes they were. She allows
me to wipe off most of the excess. While I’m doing it, she
takes a good look at me.
“Why are you wearing your hair down in your face like
that? You didn’t even comb it! And your shirt is too tight.
You look like a prostitute!” She pushes my bangs back so they
look like wings taking flight. Suddenly, it is my high school
graduation day again. She doesn’t like my up-do; it’s “too old”
for me. She yanks back all the carefully formed curls until
my hair is flat against my head and winds it around in an
old-fashioned French twist, securing it with bobby pins. My
dress is “trashy” because a hint of whatever minimal cleavage
I have is visible. She hikes up the neckline of my gown and
secures it with a safety pin to make me “decent.” The knot in
my throat screams. Tears burn behind my eyes, but I force
them back.
Now, thirty-five years later, my hand is clenched in the
pocket of my slacks. It has formed a fist so hard that my
fingernails are bending inward, digging into my palm for all
they’re worth. Once again, I manage to keep it together.
Thankfully, she loses interest in me and focuses again on
herself. One final time she checks the mirror. I can hear her
dentures clicking the way they do when she’s concentrating.
The widow’s garb is gone. She is wearing a v-necked top that
swoops down a couple of inches from her collarbone—downright scandalous for her. And it’s red—a deep rosy red, with
little sparkling beads at the neckline. What’s more, she has
found earrings that actually have flecks of crimson. And she
is wearing a skirt. I haven’t seen her legs in months. And neither has she, apparently. Or more probably, she doesn’t care
about the fine bits of skin that rest on the surface like coconut
flakes. Months ago I gave up trying to get her to use lotion;
you have to pick your battles.
“Hurry up. We are going to be late,” she says, stealing my
usual line.
The conversation at the coffee shop follows the regular
script. But this afternoon when Carl gets to the part about
going out to dinner at that Northern Italian place, she says,
“Yes, I would love to go!” I want to hug Carl. And I think
maybe she does, too.
Sunday, the day of the dinner with Carl, I call to remind
her. Big mistake. God, I should know better. She absolutely
can’t go. She has nothing to wear. I suggest outfits. No, she’s
not going. I tell her I’m coming over to help her get ready.
She starts yelling. “It is stupid for me to go. I don’t really
know him. What if he does something bad to me?”
“Like what?”
“You know, what if he kidnaps me, takes me away someplace where no one can find me?”
“Don’t worry. He’ll bring you right back in a hurry, I guarantee it.”
“You are making of fun of me.” Her voice is getting louder.
“I don’t really know him. And I am too old to go out with another man. What would your father say if he could see me…
going out with Shirley’s husband?”
“He would probably tell Carl to have a good, stiff drink
before he picks you up and wish him good luck.”
She hangs up on me.
So I go over there, this time two hours before Carl is to
pick her up. She’s a mess. I pull out a lovely green print dress,
her favorite color. Ever fashion-conscious, she advises me
that the shade is too bright for an
o-o-o-ld lady like her. She stands “What would your father
say if he could see me…
in front of her closet and starts
going out with Shirley’s
going through the clothes, slapping one after another to the side, husband?”
disgusted with their inability to
measure up. I know how they feel. She is nearing the end of
the rod now and with it the end of her patience. Her swing is
gaining momentum, she is beating back each piece with the
full force of her fist. Her face is twisted into an awful grimace,
and tiny pools are forming in the corners of her eyes.
87
I grab one of the remaining dresses. Too late, I realize it’s
green. “How about this? You wore this to the Senior Center
the other day, and the ladies complimented you on it.”
Miraculously, she forgets about her objection to the color,
but she comes up with another obstacle. “I can’t wear this to
the Senior Center twice in a row.”
“You’re not going to the Senior Center. We’re going to
church.”
“Oh, it’s Sunday?”
“Yes.” At least that part is true. It’s important at times like
this to be flexible with the truth.
We spend the next hour in the exhausting, slow motion
ritual that used to take ten minutes. Finally, she is ready—at
least as ready as she’ll ever be. Both of us are down to our last
nerve when the doorbell rings.
“Who is that?” She shoots a wild look from me to the door,
then back at me. She reaches for one of her hands with the
other and clutches it in a death
“There are two things grip. There is nothing more terrifyI will not do for a man: ing than the unexpected.
My way of dealing with it is
cook and have sex!”
unconventional. “Maybe it’s the
fashion police, coming to make sure your outfit’s okay?” I
know I’m pushing my luck, but we all cope in different ways.
She sneaks up to the door, opens it just a crack, and
flattens her eye in the space. “Carl! What a surprise!” Suddenly, she’s all cookies and cream, her face coloring as she
lets him in.
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After a few minutes of chatting, Carl says they have to be
going because they have reservations in fifteen minutes.
“Reservations? For what?” She says it with such alarm.
He manages to calm her down, explaining again about the
restaurant with the tiramisu. He helps her into her coat and
pats her on the shoulder. With his broad, steady palm on her
back, he steers her out the door. Just before she disappears,
she turns back to me. “Honey, thank you so much for helping
me. I don’t know what I would do without you!” And they
are on their way. This time, the knot in my throat wins.
A couple of hours later, Carl phones me to report that it
went well and that he has just dropped her off. Immediately, I
call her, to hear the story before it evaporates.
“He-llo-o!” she answers, singing the word. Oh, yes, she had
a wonderful time…the evening, Carl, the food—and again
Carl.
“So, you like him?” My mouth says it before I can stop it. I
have so much to learn.
Well, he’s okay. Not really her type. You know, she prefers
men who are more handsome, thinner, with more hair, more
distinguished.
“See, you shouldn’t have turned down Cary Grant when he
asked you out.”
Plus, he has a moustache.
“Did it tickle?”
She’s appalled. “Maggie, we did not have sex! There are
two things I will not do for a man: cook and have sex! I did
not even have sex with your father!”
I manage to jam my hand over my mouth just in time.
Restraint is an important virtue in dealing with these types of
pronouncements, one I need to practice a lot more.
Just as I hoped, my mom and Carl fall into a comfortable
rhythm, going out a few times a week. It’s a structured schedule: dinner on Sundays, coffee on Tuesdays, and ballroom
dancing on Thursdays. Yes, dancing! I really lucked out with
Carl. He loves to dance. One Thursday I stop by the Senior
Center to watch. I stand by the door where they can’t see me.
They are doing the Viennese Waltz, the real waltz, as my mother has informed me many times. She seems to coast above
the floor, her feet sliding from one step to the next as though
weightless. Her face is flushed, beaming. She’s back in the
1950s, a beautiful young woman, dancing in the arms of my
father, oblivious to fate and time and what they have in store.
That night I get a call from Carl. He would like to see me
for coffee, just me. For the next two days I gnaw my cuticles
and run through the probabilities…he’s had enough. I don’t
blame him. I feel that way, too, all the time. He wants a raise.
I should have thought about that sooner. He deserves one;
he’s surpassed all expectations.
By the time we meet, I’m prepared to give him more money, whatever. I’m prepared for anything—anything, except this.
“I can’t do it anymore, Maggie.”
“I know, it’s really hard. I can pay you more.”
“No. You don’t understand.” His soft, brown eyes find mine.
“I love her.” He tells me he can’t accept my money anymore.
He would like to continue seeing her and seeing her more
often. They understand each other. She is everything his
wife was not: talkative, interested in him, well-traveled, and
a charming companion. He doesn’t mind about her memory.
Every experience is delightful because it is happening for the
first time, and delight is something that’s hard to come by
these days. But with her, it’s always there, and it’s rubbing off
on him.
But the constant repetition? Answering the same questions over and over? The confusion? Doesn’t that get to him?
He shrugs his bear-like frame. He’s a patient man, he tells
me. He can think of many other flaws that are a lot more
annoying. His very presence is like a hug.
I leave the coffee shop in
He doesn’t mind about
a daze. A fairy-tale ending
her memory. Every
was not in the script, not in
experience
is delightful
any of the possibilities I had
because it is happening for
imagined. It doesn’t make
the
first time, and delight
sense. It’s fishy. There must
is something that’s hard to
be another angle on this. I
come
by these days.
struggle with the alternatives.
He can’t be after her money,
because she doesn’t have much, and he knows it. And it sure
isn’t her cooking or the sex. So what else can it be? Unreal as
it sounds, he must be for real. The unthinkable has happened.
My little scheme to fool Alzheimer’s into remission has
worked. In spades.
A few days later, I stop at my mom’s. She’s all blushy
and bustling, showing me the new dress she just bought, a
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delicate, buttery yellow with a jewel neckline. “It’s for the
senior prom at the Community Center,” she gushes. Just like
the high school ones. It’s an annual dance, held in the spring,
corsages and all, except the attendees are in their seventies,
eighties, and even nineties.
“I hope Paul likes it,” she says.
“I’m sure he will.” I stop. “You mean Carl, right?”
“No, Paul.” She is looking at her shoes with a coy smile.
“Who’s Paul?”
“I met him at Bingo. He’s very handsome. A real gentleman,
too. I asked him to go to the prom with me. Can you imagine? When I was young I would never have had the courage
to do something like that.”
My thoughts are careening like crazy, but I force myself to
sound calm. “What about Carl?”
“Oh, you know, Carl isn’t really my type. I told him I
couldn’t see him anymore.”
Seconds go by, and I can’t think of anything to say. I feel
like she’s just thrown freezing water on me…like when I was
fifteen and it was her birthday. I had saved up money from
my summer job to buy her a bracelet,
“I asked him to go a really nice one. I spent two hours
to the prom with me. in Macy’s picking it out. When I gave
Can you imagine?” it to her, she asked where I bought it
so she could exchange it. I froze just
like now, but nothing compared with the way Carl feels, I’m
sure. Sweet Carl. This is all my fault. I tried to re-route fate,
and fate struck back big time. Who’s going to step in now and
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change it for Carl? The least I can do is call him and apologize. She stops me when I get to the door.
“Maggie…”
I look back, and she’s there, my real mom. Her eyes are
alive, and she’s wearing that smart-ass grin she used to lay on
me all the time.
“Thank you for introducing me to Carl, honey.”
RIGHT:
Paysaten Thistle
John Voss
91
Dirty Poet
4:45
i could give him ten breathing treatments
he’s still 84 years old
struggling to breathe at 4:45 in the morning
i could give him twenty treatments
he still has CHF
jamming the right chamber of his heart
flooding his lungs
he’s not drowning in it, not yet
but every breath is a squat thrust
i sit with him at 4:45 in the morning
administering useless medicine
watching ice truckers, shooting the shit
it’s not lasix, which is what he needs to flush the fluid
but i’m good company and so is he
and that will have to be therapy enough
at 4:45 in the morning
A Little Soul
Eleanor Leonne Bennett
92
93
Formation of Identity contest finalist—Prose
Cecily Markham
The Wishing Stone
I walk into the room to check on her,
to see if the pain medication helped. I
am a young nurse. My patient is lying
in the bed by the window. The room
is honey-like from the sun pouring in.
My patient’s husband is lying in the bed
bedside her. He is talking to her, bringing
memories into the small, intimate space
they share, celebrating their life together.
In this moment a truth is illuminated for
me, a truth about pain and love in our
most vulnerable hour.
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He wanted to make the day timeless.
To create it that way. He dreamed of
rain with her. Dreamed of so much
rain. He wanted her words; he wanted
her to stay; he wanted her words. The
way she didn’t speak, the way she spoke
with words that would fall upon him,
and move through him like a riderless
horse on sun-washed plains, a beautiful
ocean storm he wanted to be a part of,
an indecisive wind that would howl
and howl and pull back and take with
it some part of him. He didn’t want to
know where he was with her now or
where she was, only memory, love, this
holding her pale slender arms—timeless. If he could only make the shivers
go away, he thought, to make her warm
again.
He reminded her of mountains
they had hiked and little creeks they’d
found and waterfalls with June sunbows and the long blue-green hills they
had climbed on the way to the sun. He
thought of the day they’d made love
in the river before Sarah was born,
and afterwards found a midnight-blue
marbled stone along the bank that was
smooth as still pond water. He remem-
He spoke of all their children, spoke
their names out loud—Sarah, Jason,
and Patrick—so that the thinning air,
so that time if there was any time,
would not forget. He carried her with
his own words through their gardens
of foxgloves, azaleas, and English roses,
and he reminded her how the poplar
trees along the drive to their house
sway and sing with unfettered music,
beyond courage, beyond his strength
and trembling, what is marrow and
sacred—past all that is hardly human.
She died that day lying next to him,
slipping away on violet evening shadows, and some beginning stars, who
whispered back to him, echoed to him
soft as her silk blouses, soft as her rains,
my song, my time was with you.
The river would always know how to find them.
bered how they rubbed it together and
made a wish that the stone would remain there, holding the pulses of their
fingertips inside, and that the river
would always know where they were.
The river would always know how to
find them.
remembrance, and waiting. Because
he wanted to enter her wholly, past her
human edge, all her river to sea, all her
sky to sky to her invisible self, he kept
holding her, lying next to her in the
narrowing afternoon light that was losing its day—penetrating through him,
95
Carol Baldwin
Why I Never Went to College
I learned to use a cash register at age four.
We had a family business,
red apples, green apples,
I could fall back on.
I remember climbing the gnarled trees,
picking the white blossoms,
galloping through the orchards
trying to get home to dinner on time:
a good girl.
In school we learned that numbers
could never be divided by zero;
this was because the teacher said so.
A solid source of fiber, also vitamin A.
Then you don’t ask questions.
I was a silent teenager.
I didn’t ask about parabolas.
Infinity I understood: an unending supply of apples.
We cored, pared and cut.
I saw a psychiatrist.
For checking too many times that the oven was off.
For counting to fifty over and over in even numbers.
For fearing I’d murder my family.
Not even the Mafia had that much sin.
Dr. Zeller prescribed pills that made me sleepy
so I earned C’s and D’s.
I picked apples year-round in my naps
filling all the buckets in the root cellar
making strudel for supper.
RIGHT:
Rosey Fingered Dawn
Thomas Wright
96
97
Monica Wendel
Here’s the Dream
Here’s the dream: that I’ve made the right choice. That everyone forgives me for everything. That we can sleep at night. That
the dog I’m dog sitting never barks or snaps at me but instead curls up and is comforted by me. Here’s the dream: that I am
a comfort to someone. A pin somewhere: “I’ll be codependent if you want me to be.” That I’m a good dancer. That I never do
anything stupid while blacked out drunk. There I always come during intercourse. That I’m a better reader. That I write better
book reviews. That I own a dog. That I know what it’s like to be pregnant. That I know what it feels like to have unprotected sex
with ____. Here’s the dream: I’m in Park Slope and I’m trying to walk on cobblestones in high heels. I fall and both my ankles
hurt. The stones are grey and eye level. I take out my phone to call the office and tell Dr. ____ that I’ll be late. My cell phone
won’t turn on. I wake up. Here’s the dream: big stone walls like those next to the FDR drive on the east side of Manhattan. A
museum there, that I’ve just emerged from, and a highway underneath that. Here’s the dream: I am outside a house, two or
three stories tall, with columns. The man grabs me, stumbles, touches my breasts. I tell him to stop, stretch my arm out to push
him away, drain my face of panic so he does not grow hard with my fear. Here’s the dream: he lowers his head, wraps me in
his arms, kneels so both of us are low, breathes, ashamed, ashamed of what he has done, and comes to me for comfort.
NYC Parking
Murray Whitehill
98
99
Dan Sklar
Of Time and the Beauty Contest
Sally won a beauty contest
on Salisbury Beach in 1952.
Now, Ed takes her
out summer nights
to the gazebo in the park.
One July night is like
the summer night she won
the beauty contest.
Her hair is thick and white
and sticking out.
She doesn’t know
who she is.
She doesn’t know
who Ed is,
like the summer she won
the beauty contest.
Her granddaughter won
the same contest in 2003,
the same square jaw.
Sally doesn’t know
who she is.
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Sally waves and smiles, asks
the neighbors about their cat.
Ed holds her hand
pulling her along
on the way to
the gazebo.
She stops and points
to a bright star,
the same one
the night she won
the beauty contest.
RIGHT:
Sea Turtle
Teresa Guise
101
Susan Okie
The New Patient
Old man, in your loose shirt,
with your hooded gaze that says,
Look elsewhere, I see you.
Or do I? Grasping your cane,
clear eyes, white, fuzzy hair, there—
but your edges blur, almost disappear.
I ask, the more you look away. You’ve got
a daughter in the city, once in a while
she calls. You’re fine alone, have been
for thirty years. Drink? Brandy, to sleep.
You spread your fingers, showing me
the depth of a good swig. In your eyes,
On a desert road, I met a coyote,
fur like a beaten rug, the color of drought.
He never slowed and with a cold eye
stared me down, daring me to watch him
lope past. I looked away, walked fast.
You’ve got his look, his camouflage coat.
something reminds me of my father,
how he’d fend off questions,
would never let me in. You’re sicker
than you know. I tick off blood tests,
talking past you to the nurse who’ll call you,
maybe get you to come back. But I can feel
It’s your legs bringing you in:
you have to throw a leg out sideways
from the hip to take each step. How long
has this been going on? Below the knees
you’re numb, your heart is racing, ribs
stick out like chicken wings. The more
you weighing whether coming here
was such a clever move. Better to turn off
into the thorny scrub, blend in, pretend
you never saw me. This road might
lead to the rancher with the shotgun,
not down to the stream under the sycamores.
Dr. Who Overshoots the 60s
Lance Buckley
102
103
Elizabeth Maria Naranjo
The Distance Ratio
It was a question that, in the beginning,
struck me as rude and intrusive. But
it passes the time. Besides, they never
question why you ask; the right to dignity is something most have long since
surrendered.
“So how’d you get burned?” I slipped
the pressure cuff over his emaciated
upper arm, willing my fingers not to recoil from the slick, lifeless sheet of skin
that covered it.
“Walking home from my friend’s
house. Some guys lit me on fire.”
I looked up at him. He had warm,
brown eyes too large for his sunken
face. It was hard to guess his age, maybe 15, maybe 20. A kid, anyway. “Were
you out drinking?”
“Nah, playing video games at my
buddy’s house. I was walking home
when these gang members saw me,
104
thought I was in a rival gang or some
shit. They poured gas on me and lit a
match.”
“Hmm,” I murmured, trying to look
nonchalant while my stomach flipped.
He knew better, this boy who had
suffered second and third degree burns
over sixty percent of his body was permanently disfigured and would spend
many years undergoing painful surgeries. He pressed an unnaturally smooth,
cold hand on my forearm and grinned.
“I know man, it sucks. But check it out.
The state? They said they’d pay for my
college education.”
It’s a story I thought I’d never tell. At
a burn unit, the way to cope is to leave
the stories there. Bring nothing home
and take nothing in with you. But I’m
lousy at my job. Each baby I hold could
be my own, sheets of skin peeling off,
rivers of blood pouring down her legs.
They scream when they see someone
in scrubs approach; I have to pry them
away from their mothers.
My daughter is seventeen months
old. Her bright, dark eyes tell stories.
Her mouth is a kiss. Before she was
born, I counted by years. I’d worked in
the hospital about a year. I’d moved to
Colorado around three years ago. Then
Sarah came and I began counting by
weeks. Sarah’s one
week old; it’s time for At a burn unit,
the way to cope
her first well-baby
is to leave the
check. Sarah’s three
stories there.
weeks old; the cord
should be falling
off. Sarah’s six weeks old, and she just
smiled for the first time. When she was
seven weeks old I returned to work and
everyone became the enemy, intruders
that stood between me and my daughter. I hated them: their petty complaints
about traffic, their useless drama. Their
world continued unaffected while my
heart keened in my chest, wracked
with guilt at abandoning my infant, not
two months old and in a stranger’s care.
If I had a decent job, I thought, I could
have stayed home another month, or
returned part-time, something. What
else would my lack of education cost
her? I needed a better job, a future. I
applied to a fast-track nursing program
and three months later received an
acceptance letter. The program was
intense, full-time. I would have to work
graveyards and sleep when I could. The
only opening was in the Burn Unit.
“You won’t make it,” my co-workers
said. “It’s brutal, awful. Highest turnaround in the hospital.” I put in for a
transfer. After the first night, I printed
out a nine-month calendar and circled
the final day of school, the day I would
come to see not as the beginning of
my nursing career, but as the end of
my time in the Burn Unit. And then I
began counting by the day.
*****
A man is slumped down in a tub filled
with bloody water. I’m kneeling at the
edge, holding a hand swollen twice
its size, thick and bloated, the way I
imagine a corpse would look. He may
as well be a corpse. He is burned over
sixty-five percent of his body, including most of his face, spends his days
alternating between the tub room and
sedated in bed.
Using an instrument that resembles
a scalpel, I begin to pick at the edges of
dead skin on the man’s palm. “Uhnnn,”
he protests, but he can barely open his
eyes. His head rolls back. He is sedated
to the point of unconsciousness. Although nothing can kill the pain completely, at least the Versed will wipe out
his memory. The nurse pushes more of
it through the catheter dangling from
his arm, then frowns at me.
“What are you doing?”
“Debriding his hand.”
“Do it faster.”
I press harder, scraping the blade
against the man’s flesh, chiseling away
the necrotic tissue that falls away in
clumps that sink in the water. Bursts
of blood appear, like those fast-motion
frames of blooming roses.
“Good,” the nurse says. “Better.” She
picks up her own debrider and begins
to carve away his
face. His cheek is
Bursts of blood
white and slick,
appear, like those
and she slices it
fast-motion frames
like she’s giving
of blooming roses.
him a shave. The
man jerks, and his throat whistles in
what he probably thinks is a scream. I
know that the dead skin has to come
off so the new skin can grow, and I
know that the blood means life and
should be beautiful like roses, and I
know without lopping off pieces of the
man’s flesh he’ll have to endure more
surgery and that the surgery is worse.
I know, I know, but my arm is numb,
and I can’t cut that hard. I can’t.
The nurse looms over me. She grabs
the man’s hand and slashes down with
blunt force. The skin I’d been picking
at peels away like the skin of an apple.
It slides into the tub. The nurse lets his
105
hand drop back in the water and glares
at me.
“You’d better learn to work faster.
The IV meds have a short half-life. You
know what that means, right? You’re
in nursing school, right? Now get his
wounds dressed.”
I punch a hole in the plastic over the
drain and the water and blood gurgle
away. I drape clean wet towels over
the man and, using the mechanical
lift, position him in a chair. Section by
section I remove the towels and replace
them with gauze slathered with medicated cream. I love the smell of this
cream, a smooth
I know I’m not clean smell like
equipped to deal its name: Silwith this much pain. vadene. At the
end of each shift,
I steal away to an empty room, turn
the radio on, and prepare dressings for
the next shift. I open a jar of Silvadene
and, over a sterile field, I scoop out the
cold cream and spread layers onto thin
sheets of gauze. It’s like frosting a cake.
I hum along to the radio and imagine
I’m anywhere else.
106
When the man is dressed, I get him
back in bed and return to the empty
tub room. I gather the plastic lining,
heavy with chunks of skin, and throw it
away. I carefully sanitize the tub for my
next patient, a girl of nine, whose flowing princess costume touched a candle
flame and embraced her in fire.
*****
My daughter is sleeping in my arms,
her mouth open. I lean in and inhale
the warm rush of sweet air, and my
stomach seizes. I slip my arm out from
under her and roll away, swinging my
legs over the side of the bed and curling over my knees. What am I doing in
nursing school? I will fail completely.
I squeeze my eyes shut and the vision
blurs, the trapped vision of the nurse
glaring at me.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
Gathering myself, I slip from the
room and go outside. I light a cigarette
even though I quit years ago. I stare
at the sliver of moon, but what I see
is a silvery edge of fabric catching fire
and the gleam of a metal blade and the
slender arc of my daughter’s eyes, and
I know I’m not equipped to deal with
this much pain.
Once when I was filling in as a
receptionist in the emergency room, a
woman burst through the doors and
ran to the counter.
“My daughter was in an accident,
my daughter, can you tell me what’s
happening, please, my daughter, car
accident….”
I stared open-mouthed, until someone nudged me and whispered, “Trauma Two, the five-year-old.”
I closed my mouth and stared at the
woman. Her daughter was dead. I knew
this, but I couldn’t tell her; that was
the doctor’s job. I told her instead to
have a seat and he would be right with
her. Her gaze calmed a little, and she
walked toward a vending machine that
dispensed watery lattes and cappuccinos. I knew she was thinking, if my
child was dead, surely they would just
tell me.
The minutes ticked by, and she
sat and held her shitty cup of coffee
without drinking it, and I watched a
thin drizzle of foam slide down her cup
and melt into her jeans. I wondered
how anyone could want to work in the
emergency room or be a first responder. I couldn’t wait to get back to the
lab where the traumas were faceless:
tubes of blood labeled with anonymous-sounding names or pieces of
tissue dropped into specimen cups and
wrapped in biohazard bags.
Papery clouds cross the moon, and I
squeeze the end of my cigarette, twisting the embers away. They glow down
to ash on the concrete and I rinse off
the patio, toss the butt over the wall.
Inside, I scrub away the stink of smoke
and change clothes and crawl into
bed. There’s so little time to sleep, but
when I sleep and then wake it’s time to
say goodbye again and go to class. So
I watch her until I can’t keep my eyes
open anymore, and I drift away on a
silent apology for the weakness that
I once thought was a strength—this
crippling sense of love.
*****
A burn takes forty-eight hours to fully
reveal itself. It works under the surface
in an inevitable journey with unknown
effects, like a choice that’s been made.
The nerves that sense pain are in the
second layer of skin, so the deeper
burns that destroy this layer are less
painful than the shallow burns that
leave the nerves intact. I wonder, what
is the optimal ratio of distance? If I
had to choose, would I choose pain or
numbness?
Tonight on my way back from a
coffee break, I see a woman alone in
the waiting room. She smiles at me,
and I smile back. Most of the techs hate
her; she’s difficult, she’s demanding,
she refuses to let anyone debride her
daughter unless she’s present, something discouraged so the child won’t associate trauma with the parents. A few
nights before, I had bathed her daughter for the first time, filling a shallow
pink basin with warm water and sitting
the toddler inside. Next to the basin
I’d lined a shelf with bottles of soap
bubbles and brightly colored wands.
Her mother blew bubbles through the
wands while I soaked and peeled the
girl’s skin. And when the she cried, her
mother tickled her tummy until the
cries turned to laughter. We discovered
our babies were the same age, had the
same light-up
Maybe the sound
princess shoes,
will
bring me closer
and loved
to home, to my girl.
Elmo with the
same obsessive
attachment. The mother apologized
for insisting on being in the tub room,
and I assured her if it was my daughter
nothing could keep me away.
But tonight the mother had sent her
husband instead, and looking at her I
feel the weight of her heart in my chest.
She had been cooking spaghetti, had
turned to drain the boiling water and
tripped over the toddler she had just
seen across the room.
“I couldn’t go in tonight,” she explains, looking straight ahead.
“It’s okay.”
“It’s never going to be over for her.”
“It’ll get better.”
107
I take a sip of coffee and, to fill the
silence, ask her if she has other babies.
“She’s the only one.” Her eyes are
bright but she doesn’t cry when she
tells me she isn’t having more children.
She can’t be more than twenty-five. I
think of the children whose parents
had purposely scalded them. I think of
the three-year-old who last week had
four of his toes removed and refuses to
look at his feet. His mother has never
been in to see him.
“I hope you change your mind,” I say.
“You’re a good mom.”
She smiles again and I walk back
through the double doors, thinking
maybe if her daughter is still in the
bath I can blow bubbles at her and hear
her laughter. Maybe the sound will
bring me closer to home, to my girl.
The distance is what gets you through
the nights.
108
Contributer’s Biographies
ART
Eleanor Leonne Bennett is an internationally award winning artist and
the CIWEM Young Environmental
Photographer of The Year in 2013. Her
photography has been published in
British Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and
is featured in Schiffer’s Contemporary
Wildlife Art.
Lance Buckley is best known as one
half of the DoM Enterprise Reporting System comedy duo and lives in
Waynesboro, Virginia.
Bobbye Cohen is a retired UVA nurse,
who now volunteers for UVA Hospital
and Hospice of the Piedmont.
Teresa Guise, an endocrinologist at the
University of Indiana, is an expert in
bone metabolism as well as underwater
photography.
Jim Hagan was chair of the studio art
program at UVA. He sculpted in wood
and clay, and when his wrists and
hands wore out, he turned to photography. He was also interested in boats,
especially kayaks—building them and
paddling them. He died in September
2008. His doctor, Daniel M. Becker, is
the founding editor of Hospital Drive
and also one of Jim’s kayak students.
Sharon Hostler is the McLemore Birdsong Professor of Pediatrics (Emeritus)
and Semester-at-Sea Academic Dean at
UVA who draws with her patients and
grandchildren. Her essays have been
published in Pharos and The Giant
Squid, and her artwork in Permanente
Journal.
Elizabeth Meade Howard, a former
lecturer at UVA, now serves as art
editor for Streetlight. She has recently
finished writing Aging Famously: Follow
Those You Admire to Living Long and
Well, a collection of interviews on the
importance of elder mentors and role
models for successful aging.
Armando Huaringa is a Critical Care
doctor in Los Angeles. He was given his
first camera as a birthday present from
his grandmother.
Harrison O’Connor has painted
thirteen paintings and is the Grandma
Moses of central Montana cattle
ranchers.
John Voss photographs the landscape
using both old-fashioned large format
film and the latest digital media. He is a
general internist and the Vice-Chair for
Quality and Safety in the Department
of Medicine at UVA.
Murray Whitehill is a photographer
currently living in Wilmington, NC.
He moved there in 2013 from Charlottesville, Virginia where he remains a
member of the McGuffey Art Center.
109
Kenneth Weinberg is a board certified Emergency Physician, working
in a community hospital in the NYC
suburbs. In addition to photography he
also writes stories, fiction and creative
nonfiction, which have been published
and broadcast on radio.
Thomas M. Wright, was a retired surgeon whose neurologist suggested that
he submit work to Hospital Drive.
Dr. Wright has passed away since his
work was published in 2009.
POETRY
Michael Adams is the author of nine
books of poetry and essays. His poem
appeared in Issue Ten of Hospital Drive.
Since its publication in 2013, Michael
has passed away.
Carol Baldwin’s poems have been published in Snapdragon Journal, Anderbo,
The Dos Passos Review, Evening Street
Review, Mistletoe Madness, and other
publications.
110
Barbara Brooks is the author of The
Catbird Sang and A Shell to Return to
the Sea chapbooks and is a member of
Poet Fools. She currently lives in North
Carolina.
Kathleen Cain was a long-time contributor and editor for The Bloomsbury
Review. She is the author of the nonfiction book The Cottonwood Tree:
An American Champion.
The Dirty Poet has a book, Emergency
Room Wrestling.
Laura Foley is the author of four poetry collections, including The Glass Tree,
which won the Foreword Book of the
Year Award, and Joy Street, which won
the Bi-Writer’s Award.
Will Clemens teaches at several colleges in Ohio and is the editor of All
Shook Up: Collected Poems about Elvis.
Graham Fulton lives in Paisley in Scotland. His most recent books of poetry
include One Day in the Life of Jimmy
Denisovich, Photographing Ghosts, Continue, and Brian Wilson in Swansea Bus
Station. The poem “Equinox” is part of
a collection called Equal Night, which
is being produced by Irish publisher
Salmon Poetry in 2017.
Steve Cushman’s debut novel, Portisville, was the winner of the Novello
Literary Award. His poetry chapbook,
Hospital Work, detailed his years
working as an X-ray technician. A new
novel, Hopscotch, will be released in the
fall of 2016.
Courtney Hartnett is currently a
lecturer in the English Department
at UNC-Greensboro. Her poems and
prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Gertrude, Bombay Gin,
Appalachian Journal, storySouth, and
elsewhere.
John Casey is a novelist and professor
of English at UVA.
Michael Harty is a psychologist and
psychoanalyst and author of the chapbook The Statue Game.
Anjali Jain is a pediatrician and health
researcher, and a writer of poems and
essays. Her work has been published in
Health Affairs, Academic Pediatrics, and
NPR.
Martha Kaplan is a Pushcartnominated poet, and winner of the
Dr. Zelda Mapp Robinson International Poetry award from Möbius, the
Poetry Magazine.
Timothy Kelly has authored poetry
collections, including Stronger and The
Extremities both from Oberlin College
Press, and, most recently, Toccata &
Fugue from Floating Bridge Press. He
is a physical therapist whose writing
revolves around his work with bodies.
Kendra Kopelke is the author of three
books of poems, including Hopper’s
Women. She co-edits Passager Books
and Passager journal and directs the
MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing
Arts at the University of Baltimore.
John Krumberger is the author of
a poetry collection, The Language of
Rain and Wind, and a chapbook, In a
Jar Somewhere. His latest collection,
Because Autumn, will be published by
Main Street Rag Press in 2016.
Sandra Lapham is a distinguished
fellow of the American Society of
Addiction Medicine. She has published
on the topics of epidemiology, screening, and treatment of substance use
disorders and has authored more than
100 peer-reviewed publications in the
public health field.
Kristin Laurel is employed as an ER
nurse and flight nurse. Her first book,
Giving Them All Away, won the 2011
Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening
Street Press.
Beverly Magovern Lyon has been a
storywriter for many years, telling tales
of family, health, and resilience.
Mary Richardson Miller is a painter,
photographer, and poet living in Bucks
County, Pennsylvania.
Dave Morrison’s seventh book is
Clubland (Fighting Cock Press),
a collection of poems about rock bars
written in verse.
Barry W. North is a seventy-one-yearold retired refrigeration mechanic. He
lives with his wife, Diane, in Hahnville,
Louisiana. His published chapbooks are
Along the Highway, Terminally Human,
and In the Maze.
Dianne Nelson Oberhansly’s book of
stories, A Brief History of Male Nudes in
America, won the Flannery O’Connor
Award. Her latest book, The Madonna
of Starbucks: Stories, Poems and Essays
on Food, will be published this spring.
Susan Okie is a physician and former
Washington Post medical reporter and
science editor. Her work has appeared
in The Gettysburg Review, The Bellevue Literary Review, the Journal of the
111
American Medical Association, Passager, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly.
author of two chapbooks, Pioneer and
Call It a Window.
Renée Rossi has published two poetry chapbooks: Still Life, winner of the
2009 Gertrude Press Chapbook Prize
in poetry, and Third Worlds.
PROSE
Elizabeth Maria Naranjo’s fiction has
twice been nominated for a Pushcart
Prize. Her debut novel, The Fourth
Wall, was released in June 2014.
Linda Chase is author of the novel
Perfect Cover and of several books on
contemporary art. “He Was Henry
Hudson” is an excerpt from a memoir in progress, which chronicles her
husband’s 1999 stroke and subsequent
recovery.
Rebecca Previs attended UVA for
medical school and Duke University
School of Medicine for her residency in
obstetrics and gynecology. She is now
a third year fellow in gynecologic oncology at The University of Texas MD
Anderson Cancer Center.
Marianna Crane has been a nurse for
more than forty years. Her work has
appeared in The Eno River Literary
Journal, Examined Life Journal, and the
New York Times.
Marsha Roberts has short stories and
essays in Thrice Fiction, Gravel, Loud
Zoo, Biostories, The Marin Independent
Journal, and America’s Funniest Humor
Showcase, among others. She has just
completed her first novel, The Agent,
about an elegant con game.
Johanna Shapiro is professor of family
medicine and director of the Program
in Medical Humanities & Arts at the
University of California at Irvine
School of Medicine. She is co-editor
for the e-magazine Pulse: Voices from
the Heart of Medicine and the journal
Families, Systems, and Health.
Dan Sklar teaches creative writing at
Endicott College and has poems in the
Harvard Review, The English Journal,
and The New York Quarterly, among
others.
Monica Wendel is an assistant professor at St. Thomas Aquinas College and
is the author of No Apocalypse, which
was the winner of the Georgetown Review Press Poetry Prize. She is also the
112
Cecily Markham is a nurse, poet,
artist, and integrated arts educator.
Her collection of poetry, Sisters in Rain,
won the 7th Annual Women’s Words
Award and was published by Still
Waters Poetry Press.
New Rothko
Kenneth Weinberg
113
$5.00
ISBN 978-0-692-62799-0
50500>
9 780692 627990
For more Hospital Drive throughout the year, visit news.med.virginia.edu/hospitaldrive

HOSPITAL DRIVE - News - University of Virginia

Transcription

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